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Sher;man Alexie: Flightt

by Jacob Russell on September 24, 2007

Sherman Alexie: Flight

I’ve just finished Sherman Alexie’s FLIGHT. A reading in one sitting.

I’m not going to review this book. It’s too personal, too close to the author. What would make it possible to write a review--what I think of as a review, at least, a critical review--a certain distance, a certain kind of distance, is missing.

Not to say that it’s artless, raw, like those unbearable “memoirs,” public confessionals that have earned their own market genre niche. No, not at all. Flight is much too honest a writerly effort for that. It’s honest story telling. That’s its virtue. And its weakness (though I mean that only as explanation, an excuse… for why I can’t offer an adequate review. I happily accept the “weakness” as my own, as reader. I withhold all blame from the author.

The narrator is true to his calling. He does not succumb to the temptation to skin himself--in the manner of those impossibly ugly confessionals. Quite the opposite. The personal revelation is all about escaping the limitations of skin-deep identity, of tribalism in all its forms.

This is not what I look for in “literature,” but I accept (I hope that I accept)… that whatever “literature” is, it’s greater than any of my momentary definitions. And here is a genre I confess I don’t know how to place. A “coming of age” novel, that has nothing to do with coming of age novels. A working out of a personal journey that should not be subjected to the sort of artificially bloodless critique that pretends to be above all merely human judgment.

Those who understand what that means--who understand the tension between “art” and the supremely personal occasions that provoke it, will understand my reticence. And respect, as I respect--appreciate, as I appreciate, those who work out in the ill-defined borderlines the coming into being of literature from the shit holes of memory and personal life.

Not all those efforts escape into the literary Elysian Fields, but they should be noted a markers along the way.

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