Flight

Here's the book I just finished, Sherman Alexie's Flight, given to me by the writer, ornithologist, photographer and digital archivist Michael J Bennett during my stay in the US.

In fact, it was Mike who first introduced me to good old Sherm ages ago with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a collection of interweaving stories about the hard life on the reservation. Alexie's writing is a bracing antidote to most fiction about American Indians, which seem to be either hippy dippy stories about vision quests or isn't the white man a bastard, Dances with Wolves-esque type stuff. Alexie doesn't turn away from hard life of the modern day Indian, or the horrific past, but he does it with dark humour and without self-pity, making it miles better than the sanctimonious claptrap about the Indian experience that white writers seem to churn out.

Flight is narrated by teenager Zits (he has a lot of them), a half white, half Indian orphan who is continually in trouble with the law. He is befriended by an anarchist named Justice, who convinces Zits to go into a bank and shoot the place up. As he is standing there weighing whether or not to open fire, Zits time travels through American history - jumping in and out of the bodies (a la Quantum Leap) of various people: a white FBI agent involved in murdering Indian activists in the 1970s; an Indian child who witnesses the battle of Little Big Horn; his own alcoholic father, long since dead; an elderly Indian tracker named Gus in the 1870s. The plot is a bit thin, but the novel is carried by Zits' bitterly funny voice and Alexie's ability to be breezy yet poignant and provocative.

By the way, here's Alexie on the always excellent Colbert report promoting his newest, a YA novel.