Arts & Entertainment

Review: Alexie's 'Flight' a rollercoaster ride

Monday, March 26, 2007

"Few writers grab you by the emotional throat quicker than Sherman Alexie, and he doesn't let go until the end. Actually, not after that, either. "Flight," his first novel in a more than a decade, does it again, taking off with the pace of a rocket, or more accurately a time machine, and landing right on target, in the molten bull's-eye of the human heart.

"Flight" opens with perhaps the most unpromising first-person line in modern adult literature. Not "Call me Ishmael," but "Call me Zits." But hold on.

Very soon, 15-year-old Zits --half Indian, half Irish -- is scaring the devil out of us with his unpredictable, profane, despairing, violent behavior. He is willing to torture every one of his 20 foster parents with a well-placed, ironic "whatever." Willing, it seems, to take his "99 kinds of shame" and grief and loneliness and loss and rage at parental abandonment into the marketplace of downtown Seattle and blow away innocent citizens in the middle of a bank lobby. For no reason and every reason, we learn along the way: His father abandoned his mother as he was being born. His mother who loved him died of breast cancer when he was 6. His aunt gave him $20 and kicked him out at 11.

So he takes flight, racing toward a very ugly nowhere."

Get the Story:
History's shock treatment (The Minneapolis Star Tribune 3/24)
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