Flight: A Novel

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 208 pages
• Published by: Grove Press, Black Cat April 17, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0802170374
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0802170378
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 3.2 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
A deadpan "Call Me Zits" opens the first novel in ten years from Alexie (Smoke Signals, etc.), narrated by a self-described "time-traveling mass murderer" whose name and deeds unravel as this captivating bildungsroman progresses. Half-Indian, half-Irish, acne-beset Zits is 15: he never knew his alcoholic father; his mother died when he was six; his aunt kicked him out when he was ten (after he set her sleeping boyfriend on fire because the boyfriend had been forcing Zits to have sex). Running away from his 20th foster home, Zits ends up, briefly, in jail; soon after, he enters a bank, shoots several people and is shot dead himself. Zits then commences time-traveling via the bodies of others, finding himself variously lodged in an FBI agent in the '70s (helping to assassinate radical Indian activists); a mute Indian boy at the Battle of Little Big Horn; an Indian tracker named Gus; an airplane pilot instructor (one of whose pupils commits a terrorist act); and his own father. Zits eventually comes back to himself and to an unexpected redemption. While the plot is wisp-thin, one quickly surrenders to Zits's voice, which elegantly mixes free-floating young adult cynicism with a charged, idiosyncratic view of American history. Alexie plunges the book into bracing depths. (Apr.)
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From The Washington Post
The year is 2007; the hero, a throwaway kid named Zits. Half-Native American, half- Irish, an orphan since the age of 6, Zits is a self-proclaimed blank sky, a solar eclipse. He inherited his mother's green eyes and his father's acne. At 15, he has lived in twenty different foster homes, gone to 22 different schools and owns just enough clothing to fill a backpack. Then one day, looking for revenge, he takes a trip back in time and gets a chance at redemption. Where H.G. Wells used a time machine and Jack Finney used hypnosis, Sherman Alexie uses a gun as a mode of transport in his entertaining new novel, Flight.

The story opens as Zits wakes up in yet another foster home, has a stare-down contest with his brutish foster father, shoves his whiney foster mother and ends up in juvie, the routine as familiar to him as sunrise. In jail, he meets a wise and well-read white boy, Justice, who apologizes for his race's aggression toward Native Americans and encourages Zits to perform a Ghost Dance, dancing the white people away. Once out of jail, Justice gives Zits two guns, one real, one paint, and Zits ghost dances in a bank, where he gets shot in the head. At the moment of impact, his journey through time begins. Zits's odyssey is actually a vision quest on which he learns that revenge is bloody painful.

Landing in 1975, Zits inhabits the body of FBI agent Hank Storm and finds himself suddenly sympathetic with the law as he confronts two traitorous members of a Native American group called Indigenous Rights Now, who have gruesomely tortured a young warrior for not revealing some mysterious and unspecified secrets. Sickened, Zits/Storm falls unconscious, wakes three days later, meets his wife, Mrs. Storm, kisses her and realizes he would kill for her kisses. That thought transports him again, and he lands in a real Indian camp, where Crazy Horse and his band await Custer. Zits witnesses the carnage of Custer's Last Stand through the eyes of a young Indian child and finds he's losing his stomach for revenge.

He time-travels several more times, and each trip presents moral dilemmas. He becomes the linchpin for the slaughter of children, innocently befriends a suicide bomber and finally inhabits his own absentee father.

The quest for revenge becomes a lesson in empathy, and while "lesson" may not sound like a recipe for good fiction, Zits is extraordinarily good company. Self-mocking without being self-effacing, he seduces us with attitude that seems especially geared to teenage readers: "The skin doctor tells me I have six months to live. I'm exaggerating. I don't have a skin doctor and you can't actually die of zits. But you can die of shame. And, trust me, my zit-shame is killing me."

A character who's charmingly cheeky about himself talks well about things like shame and revenge but occasionally embodies the ideas, not the emotions. And the novel's pretty much a one-man show. Even while Zits inhabits other bodies, he rarely loses Zits-consciousness, so we experience "the other" through one spirit, voice and mind. In real time, the secondary characters are more plot props than fully developed people. They range from eloquent philosophers like Justice to cartoons like the foster parents. The foster mother is described as "a short, fat woman. If this were a fairy tale, she'd be the evil stepmother who eats children. This isn't a fairy tale, so she's just a loser who gorges on food like alcoholics drink booze."

These caricatures seem deliberate and are arguably appropriate for a novel about a loner like Zits, who defines himself against the world. Why give the world dimension when its orphaned children have none? At any rate, don't look for languid realism or descriptive fluff in Flight. Alexie favors the short-cut transitions of a director, and he choreographs potent, dramatic stand-alone scenes that would play well on stage. Here Zits meditates on the nature of profanity, deciding even a harmless word can be profane when delivered with punch:

" 'Don't you look at me that way,' [the foster father] says. 'Don't try to stare me down.'

"Of course, I keep staring at him.

" 'Stop staring at me,' he says.

" 'Plop,' I say.

" 'What did you say?'

" 'Plopping plop.'

"Jesus, I sound like a pissed-off Dr. Seuss character. That thought makes me laugh.

" 'Are you laughing at me?' he asks.

" 'You bet your plopping ass I'm laughing at you.' "

Flight lacks the depth and scope of Alexie's groundbreaking Reservation Blues, but it's original, funny and provocative -- a trip worth taking.

-- Ann Cummins is the author of a story collection, "Red Ant House," and a novel, "Yellowcake."


Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Reader Reviews
Poets are often wonderful writers of short fiction, but they don't always transition well to the novel. I think this, generally, applies to Sherman Alexie. I've been a fan of his since the beginning, but the only novel of his I really cared for was Reservation Blues. I give him credit for experimenting with genre in Indian Killer, but even he admitted in an interview in the Writer that he wasn't that successful with it. Flight is an interesting concept, and the happy ending is a nice twist, but to me it felt a bit "dashed off." In fact, unlike another reviewer, what I found most lacking was the depth and poetic language I have come to expect from Alexie. What bothered me the most, though, was his inaccurate treatment of history. Because it came so early on, it almost ruined the entire reading experience for me. I hate to play the role of the white gal who out-Indians the Indians on their history, but there are some things that anyone who has read at least one book about Crazy Horse and/or The Little Bighorn would know. 1) LBH was not a trap set by the Indians for the cavalry. It was the Battle of the Rosebud, 8 days prior, where the Indians surprised Crook. At LBH it was the Indians who were taken by surprise. 2) Crazy Horse was not bayoneted in the belly, as was stated twice. Whether or not it was purely accident is controversial, but he partially fell back onto the bayonet which pierced his kidney. This may seem like nit picking to some, but if one is going to write about going back in time, it's a little sloppy not to get the details right,and I found it particularly disappointing from a writer of this caliber. I also wasn't too nuts about the depiction of Custer as the egotistical maniac who thought that LBH would launch him to the presidency, only because it was too simplistic and it's been done-to-death, but I can let that go in that this was not meant to be a history of Custer or LBH, but a novel. In the world of publishing today, poetry and short story collections aren't big sellers . In order to get their collections published, writers are often pressured into promising a future novel, and I sense this may have been one of those. For that reason, I hope Flight sells loads of copies and Alexie can return to what he does best--poetry and short fiction.