Book Review: Readings

Flight

by Sherman Alexie

Grove/Black Cat, 174 pp., $13 (paper)

Sherman Alexie's first novel in a decade is a funny and wrenching story of a teenager who bounces around one foster home after another while time-traveling back and forth in a violent search for his true identity. Alexie is, of course, one of the best-known and most widely read American Indian authors working today. More to the point, he's a master stylist, a writer who – through his ability to make readers both laugh and tremble, sad and angry – is able to move them in large and small ways.

Flight begins with its protagonist, our narrator who calls himself "Zits," lamenting his tragic circumstances. Born of an alcoholic American Indian father, who left the family when the baby was born, and an Irish mother who died of breast cancer when the boy was 6, Zits is in yet another foster home staring into the mirror and counting his acne pimples. He is deeply ashamed of his horrible appearance and feels absolutely no self-worth.

So he gets arrested. A lot. It is during one of his trips to a juvenile holding cell that he meets a kid who calls himself "Justice." Justice gives Zits a gun. Things go from bad to worse. He gets shot in the head, but instead of dying, he ends up time-traveling and embodying different people: everyone from an FBI agent who is infiltrating a radical American Indian movement to an American Indian boy during the Battle of the Little Bighorn to a scout tracking American Indians for the U.S. Cavalry to a drunk American Indian on a Seattle street corner.

Flight is a quick read. Alexie makes use of short, clipped sentences to affect Zits' inner dialogue. It is a stream-of-consciousness style that works very well here, and it allows Alexie to wax philosophic on the tragedy that is American history from the viewpoint of the American Indian. He calls it both ways, though. Everyone has blood on their hands. Both white and red men are guilty of horrible barbarism, and Alexie seems to wonder why violence is the way of all. He doesn't reach a real answer, though. He doesn't have to. In the end, it is a very simple and singular act of love that heals the wounds of loneliness, shame, and brutality.