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Flight

The wormhole to the past remains wide open in fiction, though—just ask Harry Potter—and Sherman Alexie charges through it in his new novel, Flight. The book tells the story of an Indian teenager who gets ripped out of his body and pelted backward and forward through time, from the Battle of Little Bighorn to the present day.

This helter-skelter journey couldn't happen at a better moment for Zits, as Alexie's acne-plagued narrator is known. As we begin, Zits falls out with his umpteenth foster family and winds up in jail, where he is befriended by an evangelical boy who calls himself Justice.

Justice convinces Zits to resurrect the Ghost Dance, a 19th-century conjuring created by a Paiute holy man. If danced long enough, Justice says, it would bring all the Indians back from the dead and make all the white people disappear. Then Justice gives Zits two guns and tells him to rob a bank.

Here then are what Zits perceives to be his options as a young, rejected Indian teenager: nostalgia and the past, or mayhem and the future. Alexie establishes Zits' voice so well, you want to call out to him and say, There's more out there, Zits!

But fate (or more aptly, Alexie) intervenes, and just at the moment Zits is about to start spraying bullets at the rich white patrons, he is sucked backward in time and wakes up in an Idaho motel in 1975. A glance in the mirror reveals he's a well-built FBI agent. And he's white. His job: collaborating with double agents in the Indian community to squash it.

In his fiction and poetry, Alexie has proven himself a specialist in such dark corners of Indians' history in America. In Flight he fast-forwards his hero through some of its worst moments. From 1975 Zits goes to June 1876 to the Battle of Little Bighorn, and from there to the body of an Indian tracker who has betrayed his people.

Thus the novel's rhythm skips with a channel-changer's impatient flicker from one story to the next—with Zits as the unifying presence. He adjusts to each new body, each new life, only to be torn out of it and plonked down somewhere else.

As in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, or David Mitchell's more recent Number9dream, there is a bit of cultural cross-dressing to Zits' journey: He begins poor and Indian, detours through middle-class America, becomes Indian again, then white again. He even briefly inhabits the body of his own father—a drunken deadbeat living on the streets in Tacoma.

At first these hyperlinks feel fun and amusing, but very quickly their purpose comes clear. Zits is so proud of the chip on his shoulder that even the dimmest reader will be aware that Flight has two options: give him comeuppance—or deliver him from it. And something tells the reader living in all these different white bodies will help.

This predictability gives Flight a bit of the feel of an after-school special, wherein complicated historical and emotional dilemmas are sawed down to bite-sized lessons. Alexie reinforces this impression with his prose style. Normally he writes the kind of sentences even Alice Munro could envy. In Flight, his sentences are choppy, metaphor-free.

Alexie is such a smart writer, so subtle and aware of the effects he creates, that it's hard to imagine this wasn't done on purpose. Perhaps he wanted to reach a younger audience; perhaps this novel was a young adult book that outgrew its format. It's not really clear. But Flight seems unlikely to please adolescents, either. For even they know that time travel is supposed to feel a little less driven, a little more mysterious than it does in Flight. –John Freeman


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