(F)lightweight effort

Alexie fumbles time-travel tale

Jenny Shank, Special To The Rocky

Published April 6, 2007 at midnight

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Sherman Alexie is utterly unique: an American-Indian novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, director, and comedian whose work is hilarious, freewheeling, and moving. Last time I saw Alexie at the Tattered Cover, I laughed until I was exhausted as he gave the standing-room-only crowd 90 minutes of top-flight literary comedy.

It seemed almost a crime that there wasn't an admission charge for such an entertaining evening. Alexie's most recent fiction outings, two collections of short stories, were incisive and surprising, so his first novel in over a decade is greeted with considerable anticipation.

Unfortunately, Flight is disappointing, and the signs are that the publisher knew it - why else would a novel by such a major writer be brought out as a paperback original? There are a few sparks of that signature Alexie charm in his continued poetry of the failed father and the book's humor, but Flight falls short in development and description.

Flight is narrated by a Seattle orphan with an "acne-blasted face" who is known for most of the book only as Zits. The 15-year-old Zits had an alcoholic Indian father who "vanished like a cruel magician about two minutes after (he)was born" and a white mother who died of breast cancer when he was 6. Since then, he's bounced around from one foster home or halfway house to the next, running into "Uncle Creepy types" and nurturing the chip on his shoulder.

Under the influence of a gun-supplying messianic teenager he meets in prison, Zits apparently opens fire on innocent people at a bank and then is shot by police (though the scene in which this happens is abrupt and under-dramatized). After the shooting, Zits wakes up and discovers that he's now traveling through time, inhabiting the bodies of people young and old, white and brown, usually during episodes of warfare and violence from the history of America.

It sounds like the perfect set-up for the talented Alexie to unleash his powers of observation and description, but the novel is a featherweight, coming in at under 200 pages. Flight has an ambitious premise but lacks ambition in its execution.

First, Zits finds himself in the body of a white FBI agent named Hank Storm, whose job seems to be to harass and torture the residents of the Nannapush Indian Reservation in Idaho in 1975. Next, Zits is transported to the body of an Indian boy in a crowded encampment that has a powerful stench, about which he muses, "Everybody's house smells different. Some of them smell good, most of them just smell different, and a few of them stink. So this huge village is like one of those stink houses. The people who live in the stink house don't notice the stink."

He eventually determines that he has landed in the camp just as the Indians there are preparing to fight General Custer in the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Unfortunately, Alexie does little to evoke the scene beyond that passage about its stench. Because of the lack of detail, the reader never feels transported to the past along with Zits, even though Zits makes a potentially moving discovery: The boy whose body he inhabits has a father who loves him.

Zits provides only a generic description of the battle: "I stand in the camp and listen to the battle. It's all gunfire and screams and Indian singing and silence and more silence and then the sounds of celebration. I swear I hear laughter." It's the sort of uninspired account of a battle any teenager could produce without the benefit of witnessing it. From the capable novelist Sherman Alexie, however, the reader expects much more. In a book that features time travel as its primary conceit, the reader deserves to be taken along for the ride through vivid, sensory detail.

Zits stops for a time in the body of an elderly, white Indian tracker working for the U.S. Cavalry in the "19th or 18th century." Then he's zapped to recent times into the body of a white, adulterous pilot who'd trained an Arab terrorist to fly.

Finally, Zits ends up in the body of a homeless Indian in contemporary Tacoma, and this part of the book is the only section that's on par with Alexie's past output, vividly described, funny, and moving. When Zits tries to run in the body of the homeless man, instead, he reports, "I shamble. Jesus, that's the absolute worst way in which any human can travel."

Perhaps Alexie, a master of many genres, just chose the wrong medium in which to realize the story of Flight. Flight would have been better as a play or movie so that the visual details that Alexie scrimps on would be supplied by actors and settings, or a poem so that the language would soar. For once in his career, Alexie has bitten off a huge project that he apparently didn't care to chew.

. . . another man's treasure

If Alexie's new book is a disappointment, at least he has suggestions of other books you might try. Alexie recently listed the following as his Top 10 favorite books of all time.

1. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

2. Howl by Allen Ginsberg

3. The poems of Emily Dickenson

4. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

5. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

6. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

7. She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo

8. The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright

9. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

10. Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Image, and other journals. She lives in Boulder.

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