Inner conflict

Native American novelist Sherman Alexie. (Rob Casey/Publishers Group Canada)

The smart, violent 15-year-old anti-hero of Sherman Alexie’s gripping new book, Flight, is a time bomb. His Irish mom is long dead and his native dad is AWOL — he “vanished like a cruel magician about two minutes after I was born.” The teenager has been bounced from one abusive foster home to the next, carrying all his possessions in one small backpack. He’s friendless and skinny and “looks like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick.” He doesn’t even have the dignity of a name. “Call me Zits,” is how this parable begins, “my real name isn’t important.”

That opening line may be a nod to Moby-Dick, but the real inspiration for Flight is Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the works in Alexie’s 5,000-plus book collection that he regularly re-reads. Like Billy Pilgrim, Zits becomes “unstuck in time.” Egged on by a mysterious friend he met in juvenile jail, Zits surrenders to his rage and hurt, entering a crowded Seattle bank armed with a paint gun and a loaded pistol. Just as he begins firing, his spirit leaves his body and shuttles through a series of other troubled people, among them a corrupt FBI agent during the 1970s Red Power Movement, a native child witnessing the battle at Little Big Horn and a flight instructor who unwittingly trained, and befriended, a terrorist.

“I don’t think you can call this a coming-of-age story,” Alexie says over iced coffee in a hotel restaurant during a tour stop in Toronto. “More like coming-of-blood.” Set in the present day, Flight is Alexie’s attempt, in a post-9/11 world, to understand what drives people to acts of both goodness and violence. “Whether you’re left or right, Christian, Jewish or Muslim, everyone’s ideas about the [Sept. 11 attackers] are really big. They were freedom fighters, or sociopaths.” But, Alexie says, the men themselves were complicated individuals. Set against massive acts of violence like 9/11, it’s the small stories of betrayal and decency, of making the right choice or the wrong one, that interest Alexie.

The son of a Coeur d’Alene father and a Spokane mother, he earned a degree in American Studies at Washington State University and began publishing his fiction and poetry in the early 1990s. The accolades were quick to follow: he won the PEN/Hemingway Best First Book Award in 1993 for The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Five years later, it was made into the film Smoke Signals, starring Adam Beach and Gary Farmer (Alexie produced and wrote the screenplay). In 1996, he was named one of the Best Young American Novelists by Granta. His short stories have been published in The New Yorker, including the award-winning What You Pawn I Will Redeem, which appeared in his best-selling 2003 collection, Ten Little Indians.

Alexie’s writing is filled with ambiguous, complicated native characters like Zits. It’s a correction of the one-dimensional noble savages and bloodthirsty scalpers he watched on TV while growing up on a reserve in Washington state in the 1960s and ’70s. Making Zits biracial adds another layer of complexity: he’s at once the persecutor and the persecuted.

“I’ve got no right to judge other people for being killers. In my culture, we’ve revered warriors. Look at Little Big Horn. It’s generally seen as a victory of the oppressed against colonial forces. But at a certain point, the native Americans began committing horrible atrocities. They tortured the cavalry soldiers to death and then mutilated their corpses. A military victory became a war crime. As Zits says, ‘How do you tell the difference between the good and the bad guys?’”

Though he says he’s “not nearly as charming as everyone but my wife thinks I am,” in person, Alexie is funny and warm, despite being at the tail end of a tour that’s taken him away from his two beloved sons for weeks. “They’re at that great worship-Daddy stage. I’m their god. But if I’m gone any longer, they’re going to turn into atheists.”

Alexie loves talking politics, even though he says his opinions have gotten him in trouble with both the left and right. He votes mostly Democrat and wants Al Gore to enter the 2008 U.S. presidential race, but in the next breath, he calls the Iraq war “a leftist utopian folly.… I mean, what’s more liberal than trying to bring democracy to an oppressed people?” He’ll speak with sincerity about his Catholicism and say he “hopes that there’s a little bit of Jesus in all of us,” then he’ll joke that the bottom line of all religions is: “Don’t be an asshole.”

One of his most contentious stands has been his insistence on calling himself a patriotic American. “This country was founded by violence and built on the bones of Indians and black people. We’ve never really dealt with that. But when I talk about the United States, I always say it should get the Most Improved Award. I try not to blame the children for the sins of the fathers. There’s been tremendous social progress. I think too often a certain breed of lefty is afraid of admitting that.”

(Publishers Group Canada)

Still, he says you can measure how oppressed a person is by how early they experienced their political awakening. Alexie’s came at age three, when he was waiting with his parents to get government food. “I flashed back to the television news, and seeing people in Russia standing in line to get bread. And I remember thinking, how come Russia is considered evil in my country, but I’m in America and I’m standing in line to get food?”

Poverty wasn’t the only hardship. Hydrocephalic at birth and prone to seizures, Alexie spent most of his early childhood in hospitals and wasn’t expected to live to adulthood. He went on to become a gifted student and basketball player. His family was loving and funny — he jokes that he’s the “introverted freak” of the bunch — but plagued by alcoholism. Alexie himself has been sober for more than a decade.

No one has articulated the lives of contemporary native Americans with as much insight, honesty and humour, and few native Americans have as much international prominence. Alexie’s been dubbed “the native James Baldwin” and he’s conscious of his political and cultural role. He once said, “It’s much more important for an Indian like me to be in The New Yorker magazine than it is for me or [another] Indian to be in a museum [so that] we join the culture rather than become a separate part of it.”

Yet, despite his artistic and financial success — he and his wife and kids live in an upscale neighbourhood in Seattle — Alexie is rarely happy with his work. He’s said in the past that he’s “mortified by my own books” and he takes a perverse pride in reading negative reviews. When his difficult and dark novel Indian Killer came out in 1996, a critic for Time magazine said Alexie was “septic with his own unappeasable anger.” Alexie had the quote printed on a T-shirt and wore it for years.

Flight, his first novel in 10 years, has been much better received — “It’s raw and vital, often raucously funny, and there isn’t a false word in it,” the New York Times raved — but Alexie still isn’t satisfied. He continues to second-guess the book’s tentatively happy ending. He is currently rewriting it and considering publishing a new version.

“I wrote a tragic ending [first] and I think it was superior artistically. But considering the influence and power I have in the native world, among my people, I didn’t think it was socially responsible. So I chose politics over art. Saying that makes me squirm; I do regret it somewhat. But I’m still not sure that it’s actually a happy book. Zits says that everybody is a betrayer. Today he hasn’t betrayed anybody, but tomorrow he might. There’s no redemption, just the potential for redemption. That’s all anyone has.”

Flight is in stores now.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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