SOURCE: "Big Bingo," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 260, No. 23, June 12, 1995, pp. 856-58, 860.

In the following review, Silko studies characterization in Reservation Blues.

When N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn in 1969, book reviewers fretted that the experience of Indian reservations was too far out of the "American mainstream" for most readers; by now, such expressions of concern should seem quaint. Since 1969, the "global economy" has brought changes; now a good deal of urban and suburban United States has begun to resemble one giant government reservation—clear-cut, strip-mined then abandoned not just by Peabody Coal and General Motors but by Wal-Mart too—where massive unemployment and hopelessness trigger suicide and murder. As the good jobs have gone the way of the great herds of buffalo, the United States has become a nation of gamblers. Suddenly Indian writers are not "writing from...