Time-traveling Boy

A Native American orphan finds a way to escape his misery.

FLIGHT

By Sherman Alexie

Black Cat. 181 pp. Paperback, $13

The year is 2007; the hero, a throwaway kid named Zits. Half-Native American, half- Irish, an orphan since the age of 6, Zits is a self-proclaimed blank sky, a solar eclipse. He inherited his mother's green eyes and his father's acne. At 15, he has lived in 20 different foster homes, gone to 22 different schools and owns just enough clothing to fill a backpack. Then one day, looking for revenge, he takes a trip back in time and gets a chance at redemption. Where H.G. Wells used a time machine and Jack Finney used hypnosis, Sherman Alexie uses a gun as a mode of transport in his entertaining new novel, Flight.

The story opens as Zits wakes up in yet another foster home, has a stare-down contest with his brutish foster father, shoves his whiney foster mother and ends up in juvie, the routine as familiar to him as sunrise. In jail, he meets a wise and well-read white boy, Justice, who apologizes for his race's aggression toward Native Americans and encourages Zits to perform a Ghost Dance, dancing the white people away. Once out of jail, Justice gives Zits two guns, one real, one paint, and Zits ghost dances in a bank, where he gets shot in the head. At the moment of impact, his journey through time begins. Zits's odyssey is actually a vision quest on which he learns that revenge is bloody painful.

Landing in 1975, Zits inhabits the body of FBI agent Hank Storm and finds himself suddenly sympathetic with the law as he confronts two traitorous members of a Native American group called Indigenous Rights Now, who have gruesomely tortured a young warrior for not revealing some mysterious and unspecified secrets. Sickened, Zits/Storm falls unconscious, wakes three days later, meets his wife, Mrs. Storm, kisses her and realizes he would kill for her kisses. That thought transports him again, and he lands in a real Indian camp, where Crazy Horse and his band await Custer. Zits witnesses the carnage of Custer's Last Stand through the eyes of a young Indian child and finds he's losing his stomach for revenge.

He time-travels several more times, and each trip presents moral dilemmas. He becomes the linchpin for the slaughter of children, innocently befriends a suicide bomber and finally inhabits his own absentee father.

The quest for revenge becomes a lesson in empathy, and while "lesson" may not sound like a recipe for good fiction, Zits is extraordinarily good company. Self-mocking without being self-effacing, he seduces us with attitude that seems especially geared to teenage readers: "The skin doctor tells me I have six months to live. I'm exaggerating. I don't have a skin doctor and you can't actually die of zits. But you can die of shame. And, trust me, my zit-shame is killing me."

A character who's charmingly cheeky about himself talks well about things like shame and revenge but occasionally embodies the ideas, not the emotions. And the novel's pretty much a one-man show. Even while Zits inhabits other bodies, he rarely loses Zits-consciousness, so we experience "the other" through one spirit, voice and mind. In real time, the secondary characters are more plot props than fully developed people. They range from eloquent philosophers like Justice to cartoons like the foster parents. The foster mother is described as "a short, fat woman. If this were a fairy tale, she'd be the evil stepmother who eats children. This isn't a fairy tale, so she's just a loser who gorges on food like alcoholics drink booze."

These caricatures seem deliberate and are arguably appropriate for a novel about a loner like Zits, who defines himself against the world. Why give the world dimension when its orphaned children have none? At any rate, don't look for languid realism or descriptive fluff in Flight. Alexie favors the short-cut transitions of a director, and he choreographs potent, dramatic stand-alone scenes that would play well on stage. Here Zits meditates on the nature of profanity, deciding even a harmless word can be profane when delivered with punch:

" 'Don't you look at me that way,' [the foster father] says. 'Don't try to stare me down.'

"Of course, I keep staring at him.