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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
I haven't read too many books like this-- what feels like memoir (but only of a stage in life) and sort-of topical essays about what's going on in the world, hybrized so people talk about the flow of global capital, for example, while partying and being real people who are in the world. And oh yeah, this is also a novel, whatever that means, so there's some element of "fiction" draped over the proceedings, which makes some of the confessions, about syphilis and the stuff about the novelist's dreams and working methods read differently.... In short, it's a lot.
And mostly, I really enjoyed it. Akhtar doesn't pull punches-- he is a fully learned member of the creative class and talks like it here, which I appreciated. And there was a moment, in the last section, when I thought he was going for some sort of cheap shot about free speech, and he didn't, able to maintain the thoughtful long view even when he was in the culture's crosshairs (or maybe just imagined he was). It's a bracing and deep-seeming inquiry into the world we live in today, crossed by questions about homeland and identity and sex and capital and art in ways that are really fun and engaging. I liked it a lot, and still I was surprised at how moving I found the final section, about the narrator's dad.
There are spots that I think eluded control-- the shift to play script for the testimony in a lawsuit was, I thought, heavy-handed and way too late in this book to make sense. There are some other moments when I felt that wobbling off the axis of a completely worked through book. But this pulses with its own complex life and I'm glad I read it.
And mostly, I really enjoyed it. Akhtar doesn't pull punches-- he is a fully learned member of the creative class and talks like it here, which I appreciated. And there was a moment, in the last section, when I thought he was going for some sort of cheap shot about free speech, and he didn't, able to maintain the thoughtful long view even when he was in the culture's crosshairs (or maybe just imagined he was). It's a bracing and deep-seeming inquiry into the world we live in today, crossed by questions about homeland and identity and sex and capital and art in ways that are really fun and engaging. I liked it a lot, and still I was surprised at how moving I found the final section, about the narrator's dad.
There are spots that I think eluded control-- the shift to play script for the testimony in a lawsuit was, I thought, heavy-handed and way too late in this book to make sense. There are some other moments when I felt that wobbling off the axis of a completely worked through book. But this pulses with its own complex life and I'm glad I read it.
This book read like a memoir, but it is fictional. This is probably one of the reasons why I enjoyed it so much because I am drawn to interesting memoir. But it also has an immigrant story and deals with racism, to which I am also drawn. It is subtle and engaging and vast in the topics it touches on. I particularly liked the theme of drama throughout, from literal theatrical productions to familial and sexual relationships to business machinations to courtroom proceedings and how they all intertwine. I found it clever to draw the reader in with discussions and portraits of Trump but it took multiple turns to make this a really enjoyable ride.
I was never bored by this. It’s brilliant, and it’s also a bit self-indulgent. It’s a novel that closely follows the shape of a memoir. The protagonist has the same name as the author, the same background, the same career path. He’s an award-winning playwright whose parents are immigrants from Pakistan, and the book traces his life, his political awakening, and his grappling with his own identity.
There’s a lot of ranting in this novel, but as I said, it’s never boring. It’s rather like an intense conversation with a very original thinker, taking pains to give you the details of his life along the way. There’s a circular pattern, in that he keeps coming back to central themes: what it’s like to be a Muslim in the US, particularly after 9-11; the basic character of this country; the quality of success in the US; the corrosive effects of the American emphasis on wealth.
This is the second novel I’ve read in which one of the characters is a Trump supporter. In this case, it’s the narrator’s father. In his younger days, he treats Trump for a heart ailment, and is wined and dined by him, and so he maintains a favorable impression of both the man and the advantages of wealth. Like many immigrants, he’s very rah-rah about American, optimistic about the possibilities for success in this country. And when Trump gets into politics, he supports him. But he finds himself in the same hellish landscape of excess and corruption as Trump and his cohorts.
I thought the sex scenes in this novel were pretty superfluous, although the narrator’s more serious relationship with a woman was sensitively drawn. However, the strength of the novel rests on the narrator’s sense of himself as both entirely American and entirely other, something that gets stronger after 9-11. He keeps trying to inhabit that slippery place of truth between the “good Muslim” and the “bad Muslim”, while other people try to make him one or the other. And as a playwright, he tries to show this to other people too, with mixed results.
Some quotes:
Here he writes about a trip back to Pakistan to visit relatives:
< During that trip, I resolved to stay calm through the crazy talk, to stanch my outrage, to listen for an emotional logic driving the thoughtless and obsessive suspicion. What I heard as I listened with new ears was fear. I heard the worry of a world treated to seven years of military and political bullying under the cover of “fighting the terrorist threat”. By 2008, it was clear that there would be no end to the bloodshed that the Bush administration had started based on pure fabrications, and it was easy to understand the terror that motivated the infuriating stupidity of my Pakistani relatives: that they might find themselves next up in the round of imperial slaughter, future victims of this new era of unending American vengeance. >
< After hanging up, I drove in silence. The wheels grumbled along on the blacktop. The wind wheezed at the cracked window. Inside too, I heard something – distilled and dour, the quiet rumble of gathering truth. It would be another hour before I got to the city limits, but by then my mind would be made up: I was going to stop pretending that I felt like an American. >
< The current of anger growing across the world had nothing to do with immigration, he believed, but was all about the System that debt had created, an inescapable, asymmetrical, transnational force. The people paid into this regime with their catalogs of monthly debt payments and subscription fees, all to support what was now the only true political order of our time, a corporate regime that offered no representation, no vote, no participation in either the velocity of its appetites or the bearing of its destructive course. >
< I studied her face as she slept. By that morning’s unusually pristine semilight, her skin was the color of pekoe and turmeric. My own skin – darker, a shade of murky copper – had long been the source of a central confusion: since childhood, I’d felt a visceral disgust for the sickly tints of the white skin I saw everywhere around me, the blanched arms and legs, faces the color of paste, flesh devoid of warmth or human glow, a wan affliction incomprehensible to me except as something to be hidden; I’d felt all this since childhood, and yet, paradoxically, the fact that my own skin was not white had only ever seemed surpassingly strange. Indeed, later, through my adolescence and early adulthood, the experience of seeing myself in a mirror took me aback. It was nothing about my eyes or nose or lips – nothing about my face except for its tarnished-penny hue. In my complexion alone I saw a person I didn’t recognize, someone who, had I seen him in the school hallways or at the mall or municipal swimming pool, I would have thought did not belong here. I knew that about myself because I knew that was how I saw others who looked like me. My likeness in the mirror was a reminder of something about myself I always chose to forget, something never available to me except when confronted by my appearance: that though I didn’t feel “other” in any meaningful way, I clearly appeared only that way – at least to myself. >
< In other words, however much Bork and others like him may have inveighed against personal liberties in the public sphere, they were positively gaga over individualism’s most wanton, unfettered forms in the private sector. Indeed, I’ve come to think that the central political paradox of our time is that the so-called conservatives of the past half century have sought to conserve almost nothing of the societies they inherited but instead have worked to remake them with a vigor reminiscent of the leftist revolutionaries they despise. >
This is after a trip through some run-down towns in the southern US:
< Locality itself was in decline, as dollars were drained from the American heartlands and allocated to points of prosperity along the urban coasts. In the South, it was in farming that you saw the worst of it. People – black, white or brown – couldn’t live off their land anymore. Corporate consolidation led to larger and larger tracts and the increasingly automated systems required to water and harvest them. Prices for produce dropped, yes – but so did the tax base. There’d never been more jobs that paid so little, most of which went to migrants who didn’t object to making a pittance. >
When his father ends up in a courtroom, the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice, he has some interesting things to say about the experience.
< I’d never been in a courtroom before, and I was surprised at how similar it felt to sitting with an audience as it watched a play. Years of putting up plays in front of audiences left me with little mystery when it come to their shifts in collective mood. >
There’s a lot of ranting in this novel, but as I said, it’s never boring. It’s rather like an intense conversation with a very original thinker, taking pains to give you the details of his life along the way. There’s a circular pattern, in that he keeps coming back to central themes: what it’s like to be a Muslim in the US, particularly after 9-11; the basic character of this country; the quality of success in the US; the corrosive effects of the American emphasis on wealth.
This is the second novel I’ve read in which one of the characters is a Trump supporter. In this case, it’s the narrator’s father. In his younger days, he treats Trump for a heart ailment, and is wined and dined by him, and so he maintains a favorable impression of both the man and the advantages of wealth. Like many immigrants, he’s very rah-rah about American, optimistic about the possibilities for success in this country. And when Trump gets into politics, he supports him. But he finds himself in the same hellish landscape of excess and corruption as Trump and his cohorts.
I thought the sex scenes in this novel were pretty superfluous, although the narrator’s more serious relationship with a woman was sensitively drawn. However, the strength of the novel rests on the narrator’s sense of himself as both entirely American and entirely other, something that gets stronger after 9-11. He keeps trying to inhabit that slippery place of truth between the “good Muslim” and the “bad Muslim”, while other people try to make him one or the other. And as a playwright, he tries to show this to other people too, with mixed results.
Some quotes:
Here he writes about a trip back to Pakistan to visit relatives:
< During that trip, I resolved to stay calm through the crazy talk, to stanch my outrage, to listen for an emotional logic driving the thoughtless and obsessive suspicion. What I heard as I listened with new ears was fear. I heard the worry of a world treated to seven years of military and political bullying under the cover of “fighting the terrorist threat”. By 2008, it was clear that there would be no end to the bloodshed that the Bush administration had started based on pure fabrications, and it was easy to understand the terror that motivated the infuriating stupidity of my Pakistani relatives: that they might find themselves next up in the round of imperial slaughter, future victims of this new era of unending American vengeance. >
< After hanging up, I drove in silence. The wheels grumbled along on the blacktop. The wind wheezed at the cracked window. Inside too, I heard something – distilled and dour, the quiet rumble of gathering truth. It would be another hour before I got to the city limits, but by then my mind would be made up: I was going to stop pretending that I felt like an American. >
< The current of anger growing across the world had nothing to do with immigration, he believed, but was all about the System that debt had created, an inescapable, asymmetrical, transnational force. The people paid into this regime with their catalogs of monthly debt payments and subscription fees, all to support what was now the only true political order of our time, a corporate regime that offered no representation, no vote, no participation in either the velocity of its appetites or the bearing of its destructive course. >
< I studied her face as she slept. By that morning’s unusually pristine semilight, her skin was the color of pekoe and turmeric. My own skin – darker, a shade of murky copper – had long been the source of a central confusion: since childhood, I’d felt a visceral disgust for the sickly tints of the white skin I saw everywhere around me, the blanched arms and legs, faces the color of paste, flesh devoid of warmth or human glow, a wan affliction incomprehensible to me except as something to be hidden; I’d felt all this since childhood, and yet, paradoxically, the fact that my own skin was not white had only ever seemed surpassingly strange. Indeed, later, through my adolescence and early adulthood, the experience of seeing myself in a mirror took me aback. It was nothing about my eyes or nose or lips – nothing about my face except for its tarnished-penny hue. In my complexion alone I saw a person I didn’t recognize, someone who, had I seen him in the school hallways or at the mall or municipal swimming pool, I would have thought did not belong here. I knew that about myself because I knew that was how I saw others who looked like me. My likeness in the mirror was a reminder of something about myself I always chose to forget, something never available to me except when confronted by my appearance: that though I didn’t feel “other” in any meaningful way, I clearly appeared only that way – at least to myself. >
< In other words, however much Bork and others like him may have inveighed against personal liberties in the public sphere, they were positively gaga over individualism’s most wanton, unfettered forms in the private sector. Indeed, I’ve come to think that the central political paradox of our time is that the so-called conservatives of the past half century have sought to conserve almost nothing of the societies they inherited but instead have worked to remake them with a vigor reminiscent of the leftist revolutionaries they despise. >
This is after a trip through some run-down towns in the southern US:
< Locality itself was in decline, as dollars were drained from the American heartlands and allocated to points of prosperity along the urban coasts. In the South, it was in farming that you saw the worst of it. People – black, white or brown – couldn’t live off their land anymore. Corporate consolidation led to larger and larger tracts and the increasingly automated systems required to water and harvest them. Prices for produce dropped, yes – but so did the tax base. There’d never been more jobs that paid so little, most of which went to migrants who didn’t object to making a pittance. >
When his father ends up in a courtroom, the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice, he has some interesting things to say about the experience.
< I’d never been in a courtroom before, and I was surprised at how similar it felt to sitting with an audience as it watched a play. Years of putting up plays in front of audiences left me with little mystery when it come to their shifts in collective mood. >
very well-written and interesting but slow moving and a bit too intellectual at times. a book you have to take a lot of breaks from
It's too bad I can't recommend this higher than five stars. Re: what fiction can do to comment on contemporary America, it is excellent.
I admit I started "Homeland Elegies" with high expectations, after reading many reviews that called it one of the year's best books and so on. While pieces of it were indeed brilliant, for me the whole was not more than the sum of its highly discursive parts.
What a ride. I had absolutely no idea where this book would go. I am so glad he is an American too. His ideas, stories and criticisms are honestly a justification for why I will stay in this country. I do not want everyone to be the same. I want people to be honest about their challenges and biases and be open to exploring them so they and others can grow. I am not a perfect American but I am going to keep trying to be a better human and part of that is understanding what makes me different from others and not allowing that to eliminate all the other areas where we are similar. Lots to think about here.