"Flight" | Time traveling with Sherman Alexie

"Flight"
by Sherman Alexie
Black Cat, 174 pp., $13

Sherman Alexie's new novel, "Flight," opens with a phrase that may sound dimly familiar: "Call me Zits."

But Zits is no Ishmael, and there is no great white whale on the horizon, unless you count the bloodthirsty giant that is American history. And while it doesn't aspire to be "Moby-Dick," this slim parable does have an air of self-importance that works against it, undermining the author's trademark humor.

Zits, the young narrator, is a product of the foster-care system. When his alcoholic Indian father disappears — "he vanished like a cruel magician about two minutes after I was born" — and his white mother dies, he begins making the rounds from one abusive or neglectful home to another. By the time he gets to be a teenager, plagued by terrible acne, he is alone and angry and on the brink of lashing out violently against a world where he never belongs.

Just as Zits is about to cross over to the dark side, he is catapulted back through time. In a string of sketchy encounters, he skips from the present to the '70s to the 19th century, then back to the recent past. Along the way he is plunged into different bodies, walking a mile in the shoes of — among others — an FBI agent who tortures Indian activists, a maimed Indian boy amid the carnage at Little Big Horn and a modern pilot haunted by the terrorist act of one of his students.

As always, Alexie produces many affecting moments and encounters, and there are promising themes and ideas submerged in the story, but they never really come to the surface. In the body of Hank Storm, the FBI agent, Zits is sickened by his own actions. But then he glimpses the contradictory mental compartments that make it possible for Hank to live with himself. "He is a good and loving husband and father. He is one hundred different versions of himself. And only one of them is a killer."

The most powerful of the chapters revolves around Zits' sojourn in the body of a contemporary Indian man, drunk and homeless on the streets of Tacoma. Shocked into a bittersweet self-awareness by his random encounters with strangers, the man finds a mirror where he can examine his reflection. "I am older than I used to be. I am battered, bruised and broken. But I know who I am."

In the end, with its warm message and its tidy resolution of Zits' problems, this slender collection of time-traveling vignettes feels almost like a juvenile novel (in fact, according to Alexie's Web site, he is working on a young adult book). That isn't a bad thing — in fact, I think it would be a great book for teenagers. But as a work of adult fiction, it doesn't really add up to a resonant whole. The moral of the story is a little too neat, and despite the affirming theme about walking a mile in someone else's shoes, we never get very far under the skin of anyone but the narrator.