Book club meetings begin at 7 PM on the last Thursday of each month. This our longest on-going meeting, which began in July of 1993!
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A deadpan
Call Me Zits
opens the first novel in 10 years from Alexie (Smoke Signals, etc.),
narrated by a self-described "time-traveling mass murderer" whose name and
deeds unravel as this captivating bildungsroman progresses. Half-Indian,
half-Irish, acne-beset Zits is 15: he never knew his alcoholic father; his
mother died when he was six; his aunt kicked him out when he was 10 (after
he set her sleeping boyfriend on fire because the boyfriend had been forcing
Zits to have sex). Running away from his 20th foster home, Zits
ends up, briefly, in jail; soon after, he enters a bank, shoots several
people and is shot dead himself. Zits then commences time-traveling via the
bodies of others, finding himself variously lodged in an FBI agent in the
'70s (helping to assassinate radical Indian activists); a mute Indian boy at
the Battle of Little Big Horn; an Indian tracker named Gus; an airplane
pilot instructor (one of whose pupils commits a terrorist act); and his own
father. Zits eventually comes back to himself and to an unexpected
redemption. While the plot is wisp-thin, one quickly surrenders to Zits's
voice, which elegantly mixes free-floating young adult cynicism with a
charged, idiosyncratic view of American history. Alexie plunges the book
into bracing depths.
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