Arts & Entertainment

Review: Alexie makes readers laugh and cry in 'Flight'

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

"Echoing the tragic events last week at Virginia Tech, Sherman Alexie’s latest novel, “Flight,” features a young, edgy outcast named Zits on the verge of colossal violence. Mr. Alexie is no stranger to this brand of gutsy writing. With 17 volumes of fiction and poetry to his name, he has established an impressive literary reputation as a bold writer who goes straight for the aorta. He is in the business of making his readers laugh and cry. And his most recent novel is no exception.

At its beginning, Mr. Alexie invokes the most famous opening line of literature: “Call me Zits.” Instead of a perilous hunt for a great white whale, this 15-year-old orphaned half-American-Indian pyromaniac undertakes a voyage of an entirely different dimension.

The reader meets Zits one morning when he is counting the pimples on his face (47 in all) in front of the bathroom mirror at the home of his newest set of foster parents. From the get-go, Mr. Alexie lets the reader in on the messy interior life of this marginalized teenager: “I’m dying from about ninety-nine kinds of shame. I’m ashamed of being fifteen years old. And being tall. And skinny. And ugly. I’m ashamed that I look like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick. I wonder if loneliness causes acne. I wonder if being Indian causes acne.”

Zits’s Indian father abandoned him shortly after birth. His mother, a fun-loving Irishwoman who sang Blood, Sweat & Tears tunes to Zits as an infant, died of breast cancer when he was only 6. Since then, Zits has been bouncing from foster home to foster home, school to school. “My entire life fits into one small backpack,” he says. At 8, he ran away for the first time. At 15, he is already a self-described drunk.

After Zits lands in a juvenile jail in the Central District of Seattle for the umpteenth time, he meets a white, pretty-boy anarchist named Justice, who schools him on how to take his sorry life into his own hands. Instead of opening fire on bystanders in a crowded bank, as Justice wanted, Zits finds himself on a time-traveling journey that traverses multiple centuries and transforms his worn-out soul in unexpected ways."

Get the Story:
Time-Traveling Lessons for a Teenager on the Verge (The New York TImes 4/25)
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