The teenage American Indian protagonist of "Flight," known as "Zits" for obvious adolescent reasons, has spent his young life shuttling between foster care and juvenile detention, though we can see he has a sense of humor about it. During a brief run-in with the cops, he tells us, he is put in a holding cell "with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents."
Out on the streets again, lonely, rebellious Zits is befriended by one of his former cellmates, a charismatic sociopath with a hoard of weapons, looking for a disciple to help use them. Without any adult to guide him, Zits needs to find an identity and ethical grounding of his own -- immediately if not sooner. On cue the novel jumps into a shape-shifting, time-traveling fourth dimension, sweeping Zits along on a character-forming roller-coaster ride through the bad-trip theme park of American history.
Sherman Alexie, who has been called the Native American James Baldwin, writes with anger, humor, raw inventiveness, and defiant pride. We're pretty sure that Zits is too cool a kid to be headed for a tragic ending, no matter how postmodern, but it's touch and go for a while.
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