BEWARE: MINOR SPOILERS
I also have to admit to being charmed by this book. It is imaginative and touching, especially towards the end. Flight has everything Alexie’s Native fans and Lovers-of-all-things-Native could want; an off-beat, unexpected half-white protagonist with a Native point of view, an acerbic view of ancient Native life, a comical grasp of the hypocrisy of violence, and a sensitive, adoring view of Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse is the only Indian man that Indian men are allowed to be in love with.
Alexie is a gifted writer. He also knows his audience very well. Probably better than any writer before him or since. His metaphorical tearing off of the beads and feathers at the end his movie “The Business of Fancydancing” is his way of making the statement that he is no longer a reservation Indian, so he will no longer write about Reservation Indians.
Flight is such a book. And that is okay with his audience. The story does not show the continuing lives of everyday Native people, but centers around a half-Native character’s mind trip through time and place.
Alexie now, is almost critic-proof. Sherman Alexie is the Kill Bill volume One of Native Authors. If you do not care for or like any book he has written, than you do not get it as well as his Native and non-Native readers do. Or you, as a Native American are jealous of his success (I get that a lot.) And his audience is okay with that.
What makes Alexie a gifted writer is that he presents this story in a way that draws you in and makes you care about Zits, the main character, irregardless that he is not another typical reservation character. Making him half-white lets the reader off the hook for feeling pity for him and lets them associate with his experience. Making him a petty criminal allows the reader to not feel sorry for him as a Native (Or his Native half) and to celebrate his redemption by a white family because he is half-white.
He knows his readers want to know about the decimation of Native peoples and culture and presents a startling raid a Native camp in which Zits leads the Calvary to. Alexie also knows that it is hip to present a de-mythologizing view of the teepee Indian.
Here is what disappointed me about the story. In Flight, he presents the Native American in very sad and rugged forms. The only two strong Native characters that I remember are Zit’s father, a raging alcoholic with demons, and Crazy Horse, the only Indian man that Indian men are allowed to be in love with.
There are no positive, strong Native characters to act flipside to Zit’s experiences and observations of other Natives, which are terrible. We get his father, who is so drunk drowning his own demons that he refuses strangers’ offer of help, or we get Crazy Horse in a very romanticize almost Christ-like visage, with gold eyes.
But Alexie is not that type of writer anymore. To expect him to create a Native-centric tale would be allowing my perceptions of what a Native writer should be allowed to do take over my enjoyment of his stories. They are touching and compelling tales, almost a series of vignettes. A series of short stories that I was nonetheless charmed by, even without a strong, positive Native character. What makes Alexie a gifted writer is that I was okay with that.
