[In the following review, Meredith examines the incorporeal motifs and the spiritual importance of the reservation in Reservation Blues.]

The art of Sherman Alexie surprises and delights the reader as the dreamlike images and hard-edged realities in Reservation Blues find a center on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Form and content act in unity to provide a captivating story of the tragic sense of life within a Spokane frame of reference. This beautifully written vision of the earth invites participation in specific patterns of existence.

Reservation Blues provides an intimate perception of Spokane tribal tenets and mood within a multicultural frame of reference. Death, alcohol, poverty, book-burning, and child abuse find their place, along with a sense of the land and the search for tradition. Thomas Builds-the-Fire speaks in a dream sequence for the community when he says, “Maybe something bad is going to happen to us if we don't have something better on our mind.” Each character provides added richness to the community in which the story is set, from the Warm Water sisters Chess and Checkers, to Big Mom the Spokane medicine woman, to Robert Johnson the magnificent blues guitarist.

Thomas loves the land. The reservation provides structural support even in its reduced state: “The reservation was gone itself, just a shell of its former self, just a fragment of the whole. But the reservation still possessed power and rage, magic and loss, joys and jealousy. The reservation tugged at the lives of its Indians, stole from them in the middle of the night, watched impassively as the horses and salmon disappeared. But the reservation forgave, too.” This spatial and temporal presence offers a solid sense of place.

Spiritual themes run throughout the novel, reflecting material and ethereal concerns of power and peace. The interior life of the principal characters is offered in their dreams and their thoughts as they are carried along by forces over which they have little or no control. Each passing moment is imbued with a strong sense of the past and future, but rarely in a sequential fashion. Cause-and-effect progressions lose their sense of direction in Alexie's artistic design and native images. The metaphors of tribal song and dance are offered as the structural pattern for understanding the layered nature of existence, even to the point when, as Alexie writes, “I think God loves to dance as much as the rest of us.”

Songs and repetitions of sounds call our attention to the rhythms of the peoples' lives. Their echoes in the text reinforce attention to the importance of the words and underline the points of the traditional sense of life patterns. Alexie's wordplay contributes to meaning, emphasizing unity in the multiplicity of the impact of cultural forces upon the lives of the Spokane Indian community. In the end, which is also a beginning, Alexie writes: “In a dream, Chess, Checkers, and Thomas sat at the drum with Big Mom during the powwow. All the Spokane Indians crowded around the drum, too. They all pounded the drum and sang, Big Mom taught them a new song, the shadow horses' song, the slaughtered horses' song, the screaming horses' song, a song of mourning that would become a song of celebration: we have survived, we have survived.” Sherman Alexie invites us to participate in this extraordinary work of art, which serves as a healing process.