SOURCE: "Longing for Magic," in The New York Times Book Review, Vol. C, No. 29, July 16, 1995, pp. 9-10.

In the following review of Reservation Blues, Busch comments on narrative structures in the work.

To read about Native American reservation life is usually to read about illness and despair. Fiction originating from that life is also, of course, capable of wild happiness and celebration; but the darkness is a fact of life and art. James Welch, in his superb novel Winter in the Blood, observes his characters' suffering from the corner of his narrative eye; Reynolds Price, in his moving novella Walking Lessons, confronts the sorrow directly. Sherman Alexie, whose 1993 collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, was justly applauded, writes about characters who are squarely in the middle of reservation life but who report it to us from a point of view that is simultaneously tangential to...