Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

A man who had no natural talent for playing the guitar made a deal with the Gentleman to become the best guitar player in the world. It turns out that this isn’t the type of deal that one would want to keep forever, and this guitar man eventually winds up on a Spokane Reservation. The guitar decides to keep the deal running with a young man living on the reservation, and this union gives birth to the Coyote Springs band. Alexie takes the story of Robert Johnson, the best damn guitar player to ever live, and turns it into something that is undoubtedly his own artful creation. Each chapter begins with lyrics that might appear in a blues song while unearthing another facet of life on a reservation and what came before. I found that these lyrical beginnings helped the story flow seamlessly but with warmth like a treasured vintage record.
I was further amazed by this flow when I realized that the entire book was divided into numerous scenes that averaged about three pages each. This technique immediately made me think of the writer’s self-help book Bird by Bird, and it also gave the story a neat feel as if it were a mysteriously assembled puzzle that may or may not have had a big picture in mind; I’ll have to read more Alexie to see if this approach is used in his other books. I was really disappointed when the otherwise smooth flow of the story seemed to meet some resistance near the end of Reservation Blues. It felt as if Alexie was trying to wrap everything up after Coyote Springs’ audition in New York. Saying goodbye is never easy, but I would have been fine with an ending that left me with more uncertainty.
I experienced a healthy amount of uncertainty when trying to come up with a definite difference between the functions of Big Mom and the Gentleman. Both seem to offer a path of success or damnation to the musically inclined who are willing to interact with them. Does one path represent God and the other the devil? Does it all tie back into free will, or is that my assumption that I can even comprehend the motives of God or the devil? Perhaps the difference is that one of them only offers the illusion of free will. This is the type of uncertainty that I would have liked to see in the ending. I’m beginning to realize that this uncertainty may be part of the attraction of poetry. I’ve never spent much time exploring poetry, but I intend to start with Sherman Alexie.