Double Book Attack: 7) Three Day Road and 8) Flight

Book(S) Read/Authors: Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, and Flight by Sherman Alexie

Pages: Three Day Road (382) Flight (181) And yes, I realize Flight is a little short for the, uh, RULES, but I figure TDR's whopping girth more than makes up for it.

Distraction level: Um, I dunno? I managed to negotiate the reading with a vigorous schedule of listening to the new Bruce Springsteen album (meh) watching Takashi Miike films (and enjoying the resultant nightmares) and drinking gin and tonics with Bea and Eric. Yep. Vigorous.

Method of Acquisition: Three Day Road has been recommended to me by a few people whose tastes I completely respect. Thanks Mike and Keith! Meanwhile I picked up Flight on a whim in my local library's Native section.

Flight and Three Day Road are both about the Native experience, but that comparison is extremely broad. They're both very different books. Three Day Road deals with two Cree best friends who leave Moose Factory to go and fight in France during World War One; Flight is set in 2007 and follows a half-Indian fifteen-year-old pimply protagonist and budding criminal who experiences time travel. At the same time, the boys in these books are also linked by their overwhelming awareness of their culture, its rituals and the stereotypes born from those rituals.

Three Day Road was an interesting read. It's one of those critically adored sprawling Canadian novels that will no doubt find its place in the canon of very good, enduring historical Canadian literature, snuggled alongside In The Skin of a Lion and The Wars. In that light, it is a very good book indeed. Boyden writes in sparse, controlled sentences. He doesn't waste a word. Considering that two of the three main characters have only a rudimentary grasp of English, the simple prose makes sense---the characters speak, think and reflect with a necessary economy.

I read a review somewhere that pointed out that although Boyden is dealing with stock characters---the mysterious native medicine woman, the two best friends destroyed by a war, etc etc---somehow it doesn't feel tired. I wouldn't entirely agree with this. But that's a personal thing. I'm pretty numb towards the World War One theme as rendered in literature and film, even one as well-conceived as Three Day Road. At risk of sounding a bit callous, I've simply seen too much of it. Although the scenes in the trenches are well-plotted and occasionally wrenching, I couldn't get entirely swept up in them. I was more taken by the smaller moments in the book...the moments lost in translation as a white sergeant shouts at one of the boys, who curses at him in Cree while the other boy snickers...the medicine woman whispering in the ear of her morphine-addled nephew, her arm slung across his body as he lies half-dead in a sweat lodge...the boys pushing a canoe through a shallow lake as a forest fire rages around them. Boyden is able to inhabit the brains of his characters and push breath through them. It's here where he really shines, and I think he'll only get better as time passes.

Flight styles itself like Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone crossed with a Kurt Vonnegut novel, but without the whimsy. This is a dark book that makes no bones about the intensity of its subject matter. Alexie says it loud and clear: White people fucked Native Americans up first, but Native Americans have also fucked themselves up. Who's to blame? Where does this cycle end?

Zits is Alexie's antagonist. He's smart and funny but he's been delivered a shit deal in life with a dead mother and a father who ran out on him the day he was born. Zits bounces from foster home to foster home and occasionally prison with seeming aimlessness, but we soon see that beneath the cratered skin, there is a rage quietly seething. After hooking up with a white cellmate during a stint in "kid jail," Zits begins developing a political and historical consciousness that culminates with him marching into a bank: a paintball gun in one pocket, a real .45 in the other. As he draws the guns and gets ready to shoot, he blacks out and wakes up in Red River, Idaho in 1970 in the body of a burly white cop. And---to whorishly cop some Vonnegut---so it goes.

Like Boyden, Alexie attempts to re-create historical situations---although he does it much more quickly and in fragments due to the nature of Zits' predicament. Most effective is the scene where Zits finds himself in the body of an elderly white Indian tracker in the 19th century. The battle that follows is more visceral and immediate than many of the war scenes in Boyden's novel. There's a lot of high points like this in the book but it's also really uneven. Alexie's super-blunt style is both exciting and off-putting: After a certain point, I started to get sick of Zits yelling at me through the pages. At the same time, there's no denying that what he's witnessing through these various bodies is affecting. It's 2007 and native Americans and Canadians are still living in third-world conditions, shouldering the burden of a heavy past and the continued platitudes of politicians. (Ahemcough, Stephen Harper!) Alexie is an able and entertaining guide through these worlds. I just wish he was a little more subtle in his methods. In that regard, he could certainly use a lesson from Joseph Boyden. But Alexie also shows a fearlessness that Boyden doesn't quite attain in Three Day Road, and in that sense, Alexie's hammer-over-the-head approach has resonated longer with me.