SOURCE: Ullman, Leslie. “Betrayals and Boundaries: A Question of Balance.” Kenyon Review 15, no. 3 (summer 1993): 186–88.

In the following excerpt, Ullman offers a positive assessment of the equivocal and metaphysical nature of The Business of Fancydancing.

Sherman Alexie's collection of poems and stories [in The Business of Fancydancing] weaves a curiously soft-blended tapestry of humor, humility, pride, and metaphysical provocation out of the hard realities that make up its material: the tin-shack lives, the alcohol dreams, the bad luck and burlesque disasters, and the self-destructive courage of his characters, all Coeur D'Alene Indians living on the Spokane Indian reservation. Alexie is a member of this tribe. This, his first published collection, is tautly written and versatile in its use of forms, which include prose vignettes, two villanelle, and several delicately constructed, songlike poems making skillful use of white space. The collection also contains so many fine moments, subtle and forceful...