Arts & Entertainment

Review: Native teen time travels in Alexie's 'Flight'

Monday, April 9, 2007

"Sherman Alexie never allows readers to wade timidly into the turbulent waters of his novels or stories. Instead, he simply hurls folks into the deep and seems to say, swim if you can — or dare.

However, in the thin, disappointing new book "Flight," Alexie's normally noteworthy prose skills are drowned by a goofy, scarecrow-ragged plot, stock characters and a knock-you-over-the-noggin message better suited to material for high school English classes than the trenchant fiction he's written before.

In his first novel in more than a decade, Alexie invokes Melville as his narrator intones the opening line: "Call me Zits." Then the 15-year-old half-Native American, half-Irish punk begins his breakneck story. Abandoned first by his father, then his mother (who dies when he is 6) and booted from his aunt's house at 10, Zits rips through foster homes (21 and counting), ducks cops, does a little time in juvie and fantasizes about selling the naming rights to all the acne marks on his face (47 and counting) and on his back (too many to count).

Alexie wastes no time in putting Zits on the run again after the teen mouths off to a new foster pop and shoves the new foster mom. The "orphan meteor" bolts into the streets of Seattle. He sees the fuzz, thinks he can duck them, but it "takes them only thirty-five seconds to catch me."

In lockup, Zits befriends a ghostly fellow named Justice. When they're released, the two, armed with a paintball gun, start raising hell on unsuspecting citizens. Zits' homicidal dreams lead him into a bank, brandishing the paintball gun and a real .38 Special. He pulls on both triggers until "the bank guard shoots me in the back of the head. I am still alive when I start to fall, but I die before I hit the floor."

Only Zits isn't really dead, and Alexie's plot becomes a mash-up of historical fiction and sci-fi. Zits zaps back and forth in time, inhabiting the bodies of people who are in decidedly dangerous situations. He still has his mind, but he must battle the brains and bodies of those he takes over."

Get the Story:
'Flight' by Sherman Alexie (The Los Angeles Times 4/8)
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