August 3, 2007 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 9

eveningsout

Leaving this life, a boy passes through many others

Flight

by Sherman Alexie

Black Cat, $13 trade paperback

by Anthony Glassman

The tone of an author's writing, his or her perspective, the sum total of the way she or he writes, is called the author's "voice."

Since authors are instructed to write what they know, their voice is generally the melodic reflection of the life they've lived,

FLIGHT

SHERMAN

ALEXIE

their experiences. Rich white American men write one way, goat-herders in remote Ukrainian villages write another.

For every layer of identity, there is a corre-

sponding layer of voice.

gay

For American Indian

author Sherman Alexie, the layers

of his identity seem, surprisingly, to be far outstripped by the layers of his voice. His latest novel, Flight, justifies the high regard in which he is held.

Flight is the story of Zits, an acne-ravaged teenager who has bounced from foster home to street to juvie to foster home for years, ever since his father ran out and his mother died.

He is, in the words of a Cher song, a halfbreed, the child of an American Indian father and an Irish-American mother. He doesn't belong to either tribe, an outcast, practically a leper.

After running out of his latest foster home, he winds up in jail for a night after his foster parents fabricate an assault complaint. There, Zits meets Justice, a self-named white boy who admires American Indian culture, abhors the inequities of the world and wants to change the planet.

Zits, always on the lookout for a worthy father figure, even one his own age, immediately is drawn to the young man, who later rescues him from a juvenile half-way house. They live together in an abandoned factory, plotting radical acts to strike at a system that has abandoned them.

Their plans reach fruition when Zits, packing a .357 Magnum and a paintball gun, goes into a busy bank lobby and opens fire, before being shot in the head by the bank guard.

It's generally a little difficult to continue a story when your protagonist's brains are splattered all over a bank, but Alexie does go on. He takes the story into Zits' past... although not his own, personal past.

The teenager begins jumping into other people's bodies, experiencing events in history. Custer's last stand. An Army attack

on a native settlement. A meeting between two FBI agents and their double-agent, American Indian radical informants. The suicide of a flight instructor who unwittingly trained a terrorist.

He desperately hopes each time that the next leap, to steal a line from the introduction of a science fiction TV show, will be the leap home. Each life he briefly inhabits is filled with betrayal, with traitorous action, with pain. Were he to leave those other lives and rejoin his own in that half-second of life he had left, it would be a surcease from other people's pain, suffering that he was forced to experience as his own.

His final experience in another body finally answers some of the questions he has about his own life, but will any of it be enough to exorcise his demons and burn off his sins?

Alexie, who first garnered critical acclaim with his 1993 short stories of reservation life made into the film Smoke Signals, never disappoints.

He has created an immensely enjoyable, fast-paced and engrossing novel of redemption with Flight.

The publishers included a discussion guide. Ignore it. You're probably not in school, and don't need to be told what to

question and what to glean from a book. If anything, the discussion guide made the book seem like a young adult novel. The book is so fast-paced, specters of English teachers swirled around when looking through the guide. Nowhere, however, are the words "young adult" listed, so hopefully those ghosts can be laid to rest.

Whether he's adapted his writing for the screen, coming up with an original film (The Business of Fancydancing) or simply writing fiction, Alexie is a remarkable author with a unique voice, and Flight will not disappoint.

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