Thursday, June 19, 2014

Sherman Alexie and My Love Affair with the Library

I love libraries. One summer, I think I was five, my aunt took her kids and my siblings and me to our local library and signed us all up for library cards. Every week that summer either my aunt or my mother would drive the five cousins to the library. It was heaven on earth. That tradition continued for many years.

When my daughter was small we attended story time at our local library--much bigger than my first local library. We went to the library almost every week. Sometimes more than that. We moved two years ago; my daughter started school; I started working again. And going to the awesome library in our new neighborhood became a more rare occasion. A few weeks ago on our way home, she asked if we could go to the library. So we did, and we're trying to make it a habit again.

Last week, I went to the library on my own, which was a nice treat. I wandered around the fiction section without feeling rushed. I picked up probably nine novels before I decided that nine novels is probably too many for the time I have. Three is a much easier number to manage. I grabbed a Judy Blume novel (turns out I had already read it, but I enjoyed the re-read) The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, which I'm currently reading, and Flight by Sherman Alexie.

Here's one of the things I love about the library: I love Sherman Alexie. I know that I love Sherman Alexie, but I sometimes forget that I want to read Sherman Alexie. Now this has less to do with Sherman Alexie and more to do with my own fleeting and flighty memory. So the library is great because I wander down an aisle, see an Alexie novel, and am reminded that I wanted to read more of his work. The library provides.
I decided to read Flight first because it is the shortest of the books I grabbed. And I sat down thinking I would read a chapter or two and then get some work down, but I didn't. I sat down, laughed, cried, and read a novel before it was bedtime.

Flight is the story of a half Native American, half Irish kid who time travels to important moments in American history and witnesses great violence and amazing aches of bravery and cowardice. It has Sherman Alexie's characteristic snark, beauty, humor, sadness, and hope. It's a very dramatic book. Some people might think a little too dramatic, but it worked for me.

It was published in 2007, four years after the US invaded Iraq. I think this book is, in a lot of ways, a response to the political climate of post-9/11 America. The anger and fear and violence. The sadness and cynicism. The hope that somewhere, something has to make sense again. The private and public tragedies.

There are similarities between Flight and Slaughterhouse-Five--the time travel element, a personal narration of very public moments, which serve to ground these moments, looking at both sides of an event that is often only viewed from one, a narrator that may or may not be mentally unhinged. And I think if you liked one, you would probably enjoy the other. This comparison is not meant to imply that Flight is a ripoff of a classic, but rather to place Alexie's novel in a line of American novels exploring violence and its insidious nature. And how story telling and our experiences are never as clear cut and well reasoned as we would like to believe. Our world is much murkier and gray than is sometimes admitted, but that isn't an excuse for inaction. Our choices matter and the reason we make our choices matter.

I highly recommend Flight, or really anything that Alexie has written. I've never been disappointed yet. I can't wait to go back to the library and be reminded of another author I've been meaning to read or maybe make a brand new friend, one I've never met before.

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