In the opening chapters of the extraordinary new
novel Flight, Sherman Alexie’s narrator, a
lonely, orphaned, biracial teenager who calls himself Zits, fires
two guns in a bank and is quickly shot dead by a guard. What
follows is a series of scenes, all violent and each of increasing
personal significance for the protagonist. They span the 19th,
20th, and 21st centuries; most predate his existence. That’s right:
This book is about a gun-toting, time-traveling teenager. And it’s
brilliant.
Starting when Zits shoots up the bank, each
act of violence begets what the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might have
called a “timequake,” sending our “half-breed” Billy Pilgrim into
situations rife with complex questions about history, nationhood
and personal identity. Zits inhabits the bodies of white and Native
American men – think Slaughterhouse-Five meets
Being John Malkovich – while witnessing past
after past. As Zits puts it, in these places “the wounded
recognized the wounded,” and each scene helps him better understand
his complicated present, the multitudes he contains: “I am Irish
and Indian, which would be the coolest combination in the world if
my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But
they’re not here, and haven’t been for years, so I’m not really
Irish or Indian.”
In this passage, as in the rest of the
book, Alexie uses not just his trademark humor, but a plain (and
plaintive) poetic voice. In Flight’s opening
pages, Zits describes his newest in a long line of lousy foster
fathers as “the sports section with a bad haircut.” Towards the
end, a much kinder adult smiles at him, and Zits reflects, “Every
one of those teeth is a statue of somebody beautiful.” His powers
of observation are most evident as he reorients himself inside new
and widely different people and places. While inhabiting a pilot,
Zits realizes he has “borrowed (the pilot’s) courage and joy, as
well as his sadness and regret.” In the body of Hank Storm, an FBI
agent, Zits gets a visit from the Storm family in a hospital bed:
“Hank makes the world safe. He is a good and loving husband and
father. He is one hundred different versions of himself. And only
one of them is a killer.”
Alexie’s 15-year-old can talk
about his feelings with disarming candor. Though it takes some
getting used to, it’s plausible – his life in the foster care
system makes his violent tour through U.S. history seem like summer
vacation. Phrases like “You can’t trust people with your love” and
“It hurts to have hope” read like poetic recognitions, fresh
reports from our troubled times.
Flight reads quickly and its simple prose has a
sense of wonder about brutalities of every scale. A representative
sample comes in a scene where, from the body of an adulterous
airplane pilot, Zits watches the man’s wife smash his model planes
as she kicks him out of the house. “… She throws out plastic
airplanes, toy airplanes, model airplanes, remote control
airplanes. They crash into the lawn. They crash into the apple tree
in the front yard. They crash into the driveway. They glide and
crash into the street. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty little plane
crashes.”
This act recalls what one of Zits’ Indian
foster fathers had done to him once, smashing $600 of
remote-control plane after being outmaneuvered by the teenager.
Wounded by the loss of both parents, struggling with identity and
authority, Zits’ longing to understand his present through his past
is as single-minded as Captain Ahab’s quest for revenge on the
white whale. But Zits’ ultimate destination – honest, real
connection with a trustworthy person – is closer to Ishmael’s
reason for heading to sea in the first place.
Zits finds
this connection most intensely while inhabiting a drunk, homeless
Indian man. After stopping a white man on his way to work,
Zits-as-panhandler demands respect from the man in the form of a
story. “Something personal,” he says, “something secret.” In a
scene that shows the accumulated cost of continual violence, Zits
and the reader realize, nearly simultaneously, just where – and in
whom – he has arrived.
Released in the wake of the
Virginia Tech shootings, the book’s eerie verisimilitude makes it
tough to read at points. But the ending is not one of them.
Alexie’s disturbed young man, possessed of unhealthy notions about
right and wrong, has learned enough to correct the tailspin, to get
through the turbulence. From its cover, you might think the book is
about guns. Flight soars because its true
subject is justice.
Flight
Sherman Alexie
208 pages, softcover: $13.00.
Grove/Atlantic, 2007.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Portrait of the artist – as many young men.
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