Flight by Sherman Alexie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “It's horrible, but it’s funny too at the same time” An anonymous, angry, alienated half-white, half-Native American fifteen-year-old boy nicknamed Zits (he counts 47 on his face alone) is telling us his life story (abandonment at birth by his Indian father, loss of his mother to breast cancer at age six, umpteen foster families and group homes and schools and arrests and experiences of abuse) when in a holding cell he meets a beautiful seventeen-year-old white boy who has named himself Justice. Justice turns Zits on to guns, and soon Zits is shooting people in a bank, getting fatally shot himself, and waking up in the body of a white FBI agent doing dirty work on an Indian reservation in 1975. This starts Zits, a self-proclaimed “blank sky, a human solar eclipse” and “a time-traveling mass killer,” on a vivid educational journey through time, place, and person (or through hell and or heaven). From inside a series of white or Native American hosts, he becomes a passive participant in various moments of crisis and violence, including the Battle of Little Bighorn (as a mute Indian boy) and the revenge massacre of a village (as an arthritic Indian killer). The ghost of 9/11/2001 is present, as Zits temporarily inhabits a flight instructor who taught a Somali immigrant how to fly, with unexpected consequences. Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007) is an angry book, but much of the anger is directed not at white America’s treatment of Native Americans but at human beings’ propensity for violence, hatred, abuse, betrayal, and “the monster revenge.” The novel explores Zits’ quest for a way to survive psychologically intact in that world by empathizing with a variety of people from past and present, as well as his search for his father and a family. It is also a funny book! Zits (Sherman Alexie) has an irreverent, self-deprecating, and frank sense of humor, and I laughed at least as often while listening to the book as I winced. His riffs on foster families, policemen, TV, acne medication, and the smells of a huge, real old-time Indian camp, etc., cracked me up. At times the short novel reads like a Native American teenage Bukowski (Chinaski). The novel demonstrates that there are both good and bad white people and Native Americans and that “We’re all the same” (betrayers and betrayed, lovers and loved, haters and hated, etc.), but Zits’ travels through time, place, and person never get him inside a female host, or for that matter in an African- or Asian- or Hispanic-American host, or a gay one. This limits the scope of his novel to Native American and white and male experience. Also, after the devastating first three-quarters, the ending, though heart-warming, is almost too good to be true. Adam Beach reads the book perfectly, with an appealing Native American lilt in his English. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University