"Sherman Alexie's short story "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" is a mighty high standard for any contemporary American writer to match. The fusion of emotion and image, sympathy and grace, the fluidity and power of its language, make it for me one of the finest short stories of the decade. The way it depicts contemporary American Indian life on the streets of Seattle, and in the hearts of Americans - hard to beat!

So I began turning pages of Alexie's new collection with great expectations. He's one of the few writers of his generation who might meet, or possibly even exceed, his own mark. Alas, in "War Dances," he doesn't even come close. Of course, it's a bit unfair to make this kind of comparison, especially in a collection as interesting overall as this one. Look what we have here, 200 pages of smart modern stories interspersed with witty and deep-feeling verse.

You can almost feel Alexie reaching out to us, and to his muse, saying, Look, I don't just write lyric and beautiful stories about people like myself - I can write smart, lean and fast-moving tales about (mostly) men in modern life, whatever tribe they grew up in.

Take the main character of the first story, "Breaking and Entering," a man who discovers certain truths and uncertainties in a murderous encounter with a young black kid from his neighborhood. He's a middle-class American Indian, rather than one of the whiskey-soaked inhabitants of the Seattle tenderloin, as is the protagonist of that beautiful New Yorker story."

Get the Story:
Review: 'War Dances,' by Sherman Alexie (The San Francisco Chronicle 12/2)