Bibliofreakblog

Flight by Sherman Alexie

I’ve lived in Seattle for almost four years now and I spend a lot of time in dive bars in Pioneer Square, so this book kind of stuck with me.  Most of the homeless people, Native American or otherwise, in PS are pretty harmless.  Some are even entrepreneurial entertainers and will sing or tell jokes for a buck.  Some are obviously crazy or on drugs or drunk, but when I’m hanging out at the Merchant’s Café on a sunny Friday afternoon during the summer, so am I, so who am I to judge? 

And people watching from “the Merch” as we regulars call it, is not limited to homeless people, but tourists as well.  Mobs of people gather daily for the Underground Tour over at Doc Maynard’s, but I just take visiting friends and family downstairs at the Merch because all one sees on the Tour is basements. 

My point is, I really like hanging out in PS.  While the homeless situation in Seattle is indeed a problem, don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to cities where the transient population has it worse (I grew up in Detroit, after all). 

I think that everyone probably likes to read about places with which they are familiar.  It’s like being at a concert and the band mentions some bar they were at the night before and you get all excited because you’re like, I’ve been there!  I’ve never seen Sherman Alexie around PS but I’m sure that we’ve just missed each other.  I mean, I’m still waiting to run into Bill Gates somewhere in Seattle, too.

I also used to work at a hospital where we’d get kids from Alaska to Montana.  We got a lot of kids from reservations, and also a lot of kids in foster care (of all backgrounds), so that kind of struck a chord with me, too.  I’ve seen some fucked up parents, some fucked up foster parents, and I’ve seen some truly amazing people.  But I seem to remember the bad more than the good.  Why is that?

But besides all of this excitement of knowing exactly what Alexie means when he writes about the homeless sorta drunk sorta crazy Indians in Pioneer Square, the book on a whole is exciting.  Words flow out of Alexie like magic-and I don’t mean that in a New-Age-Shamanistic-Genetic-Native-American talent sort of way (though I wouldn’t dismiss it entirely, either).  I mean it in the way that I say to myself, damn, I wish I could write like that.  I mean it in the way that the guy has serious skills in the English language and story telling in general. 

The story itself starts out normal.  Parentless foster kid from the Spokane tribe meets his new foster parents.  It’s obvious he has a whole inside of him where his parents should be, whether he might admit to that or not.  But then it gets weird.  He slips into the body of a Civil Rights era FBI agent, a kid at the battle of Little Big Horn, an Indian tracker in the Old West, and a pilot, and then it gets complicated.

The ending is sort of happyish.  I won’t say more than that there’s some hope for our protagonist.  Inconclusive endings are always the best though.  Maybe this kid will end up like his parents, maybe he’ll go crazy (again?), maybe he’ll wind up in jail (again), but maybe he’ll turn out to be a normal kid.  And for this kid, as for most foster kids, that’s what you really want.  A normal, well-adjusted life.

Buy Flight on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore
Rant by Chuck Pahlaniuk
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
Black Hills by Dan Simmons
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
Kindred by Octavia E Butler
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative by Thomas King
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn by Larry Colton
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger 
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus 
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton 

Other works by Sherman Alexie:

Old Shirts & New Skins 
Reservation Blues
War Dances
The Man Who Loves Salmon
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
The Toughest Indian in the World
First Indian on the Moon
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dangerous Astronomy
The Summer of Black Widows
Water Flowing Home
Ten Little Indians
Face
Indian Killer
I Would Steal Horses
Seven mourning songs for the cedar flute I have yet to learn to play 
The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems
One Stick Song

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