Publisher's Weekly Review
From National Book Award-winner Alexie comes a new collection of stories, poems, question and answer sequences, and hybrids of all three and beyond. In a penetrating voice that mixes humor with anger, Alexie pointedly asks, "If it is true that children pay for the sins of their fathers, then is it also true that fathers pay for the sins of their children?" Many of the stories revolve around the complexities of fatherhood; in the title story, the Native American narrator recalls his alcoholic father's death as he confronts his own mortality, and "The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless" is the tale of an eccentric vintage clothing salesman whose sexual attraction to his wife fades following the birth of their children. The collection also contains stirring defenses of artistic integrity; "Fearful Symmetry" is an incisive account of working as a young screenwriter for a Hollywood studio, and the poem "Ode to Mix Tapes" endorses hard work as the key ingredient behind any creation. Alexie unfurls highly expressive language, and while at times his jokes bomb and the characters' anger can feel forced, overall this is a spiritedly provocative array of tragic comedies. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
From prolific Alexie (Face, 2009, etc.), a collection of stories, poems and short works that defy categorization. It's wildly uneven: A few pieces drawn from his experiences as a member of the Spokane tribe rank with the author's best, but much of what surrounds them feels like filler. Of the 23 selections, the longest and best is the 36-page title story. Sixteen chapters, some as short as two paragraphs, connect the dots between a hospitalized father's fatal alcoholism and the nonmalignant brain tumor of his son, a 41-year-old writer accused in one hilarious incident of subjecting another Indian to racist stereotyping. Alexie frequently uses plainspoken language in first-person narratives to deal with ethical ambiguities"to find a moral center," as he writes in "Breaking and Entering." That tale shows the narrator, a film editor, editing the facts to fit his story, only to feel victimized by the media's editing of an incident that changes his life. Other pieces don't work as well. "The Senator's Son" is a clich-riddled, credulity-straining parable of forgiveness concerning Republican hypocrisy and violent homophobia. "Fearful Symmetry" teases the reader with a protagonist whose name (Sherwin Polatkin) and description ("a hot young short-story writer and poet and first-time screenwriter") both suggest an authorial stand-in, yet it has nothing more interesting to say about blurring the distinction between memoir and fiction than to ask, "What is lying but a form of storytelling?" "The Ballad of Paul Nothingness" ambitiously attempts to encompass the mysteries of desire, a critique of capitalism and the power of popular music. The latter also provides inspiration for "Ode to Mix Tapes," the collection's best poem; most of the other verses are slapdash and singsong. The author's considerable talent is only intermittently in evidence here. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
Alexie's appealing collection of short stories, poems and self-interrogations opens with an attempted murder and closes with an epitaph. Mortality is much on the mind of this puckish writer, who continues to sift common truths through the sieve of his Indian identity, albeit with the alacrity of a man barreling away from his youth. In the droll title story, the narrator, attending the funeral of the father for whom he was named, finds himself staring down at what could be his own tombstone. Then he careers across a riot of black-comic ruminations that play the father's alcoholically hastened demise off the son's discovery that he has a brain tumor. Alexie's upbringing sensitizes him to the nuances underlying perceived hate crimes: in "Breaking and Entering," an Indian film editor who trims a sex scene to protect a woman's reputation unwittingly kills a black teenage burglar and is recast by the media as a white racist. Throughout, Alexie's occasional glibness is balanced by a self-mocking candor that implicates him in his male characters' aggressions. In his lovely poem "Home of the Braves," he sympathizes with women friends who know "That I can be just one more boy,/ A toy warrior who explodes/ Into silence and warpaths with joy."
Library Journal Review
National Book Award winner/New York Times best-selling author Alexie's (www.fallsapart.com) collection of stories, poems, and essays portrays a variety of characters dealing with difficult, often bittersweet situations. Alexie himself reads, with passion and sardonic humor. The strongest essays are those influenced by the author's own Native American heritage, especially the parts in which he channels his Spokane Indian father. Includes explicit language (notably, of the f**k variety); recommended for anyone who appreciates quality short fiction and nonfiction. [The Grove Pr. hc, which was published in 2009, won the 2010 PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction; the Grove pb is scheduled to be published in August.-Ed.]-J. Sara Paulk, Fitzgerald-Ben Hill Cty. Lib., GA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
