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Sherman Alexie's Flight was a quick read, a much sparser book than his first novel, Indian Killer. That earlier work was more dense, much darker. I actually appreciated that first novel very much -- it was an angry, despairing book that captured well the continuing struggles and tensions of a modern-day rez-Indian and its dark, unrelenting sensibility was disturbing yet poignant too.

At the LA Times Book Festival, I heard Alexie talk about Indian Killer which he says he hates. He felt it was so angry and basically was his reaction to all of the pressures and conflicting expectations for him to be a mouthpiece for "the Indian Experience." I actually think it was an engrossing novel, nevertheless.

Anyway, what it has to do with Flight is that Alexie's wife pointed out to him that this one was his Indian Killer rewrite. This one is about an Indian teenager foster kid -- unloved, unwanted, and unhinged -- who at a moment of sheer death and destruction in contemporary times, is plunged back into time to relive in different personas, seminal moments of sheer death and destruction in Indian history in America.

But this is a different novel. It's shorter, breezier almost. And has a redemptive ending. And tho' at first, I was wondering if perhaps Alexie had lost his touch with the too short chapters and the quick-cut jumping around of the character into different bodies and periods of time (making me compare it unfavorably at first to Octavia Butler's Kindred, a much more masterful time-jump-back novel dealng with the legacy of slavery in the South), there's a scene that he inserts about 3/4s through that is just KICK-ASS and completely turns the tales on their heads. It becomes a more intimate take on sins of the father and is ultimately about what Alexie described (in ironic, yet beneath, maybe quite sincere) "the kindness of strangers" and "forgiveness."

He said at the Festival that he could've written the darker ending -- did in fact write several -- but in the end "I just didn't want to put that shit out there." And in light of the fact that the novel was released in April 2007 -- around the time of the Virginia Tech incident -- Alexie said he felt well-satisfied with that decision, despite any critical knocks for doing so.

And I actually agree. I'm still mulling over that ending he chose. I almost feel like these days, the darker endings are becoming the trite ones. So in a way, a redemptive ending may be the weird, edgy twist, after all.