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emily_koopmann's review
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Racial slurs, Racism, and Terminal illness
moosegurl's review
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Oh my god. This book! It reallllly defies description. How much of it is real -- and how is that the thing I want to know when it is so obviously not the point? Truth vs. fiction, the fictional nature of all truth, false facts, fake news ... but also is he just protecting his family? BRILLIANTLY written, an intense exploration of what it means to be honest in America, with no easy answers.
"And, yes, the blow-by-blow of Father's enthrallment with candidate Trump, first nascent, then ascendant, then euphoric, then disappointed, then betrayed and confused, and finally exhausted, a gamut of intensities whose order and range are proper to the ambit of all addiction--yes, a granular account of Father's addiction, his ceaselessly shifting emotions, his evasions and avowals and disavowals, the steady shedding of his civility, the daily obsession, the ad hoc rationalizations--all this might be of value to note, to show, and, in the process, through this unlikeliest of American Muslim lenses, to reveal the full extent of the terrifying lust for unreality that has engulfed us all."
"Elsewhere, I've referred to Trump's ascendancy as the completion of the long-planned advent of the merchant class to the santum sanctorum of American power, the conquering rise of mercantilism with all its attendant vulgarity, its acquisitive conscience supplanting every moral one, an event in our political life that signals the collapse not of democracy--which has, in truth, enabled it--but of every bulwark against wealth-as-holy-pursuit, which appears to be the last American passion left standing."
"To have lived through events like these so young was to know that murder is not an abstraction or something perpetrated only by evildoers. Good people could kill and be killed."
" 'A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.' "
"It might be hard for a non-Muslim American--an agnostic or atheist, or a secular humanist--to understand the perspective I'm describing, in which the sole signifier ("Christian") is used to stand in for the totality of American life. For indeed, where some might see modernity or individualism or mercantile democracy or the heritage of the Enlightenment or an irreducibly complex and endlessly heterogeneous nation, we saw Christianity. To us, it was all Christian. Not just the churches and their ice cream socials and Friday fish fries; or the bacon at breakfast; or the wine with wafers on Sundays and with everything else all week long. Not just the place names and first names drawn from the Gospels and the roll of Catholic saints; or the painted eggs in April and pine wreaths and winter sleds in December. No, I mean also the department-store sales in January and the interest-charging credit cards used at them; and the vacations spent at the beach driven by the bizarre urge to darken one's skin; and the shrill perfect fifths of a violin; and the notion that running a piece of toilet paper along your anus is enough to keep you clean; and the discomfort of working with a blade of cloth tied to your neck so tightly you can barely breathe; and the bikinis and knee-high skirts; and, of course, the needlessly happy ending to every story."
"But what to tell them? That I was lost and broke and felt persistently humiliated and under attack in the only country I'd ever known, a place that the more I understood, the less I felt I belonged?"
"In this country, the white majority is basically blind to the worst in themselves."
"holding stock in Timur Capital isn't any different from owning a stake in Nike, or Apple, or Exxon, or Goldman, or VW, or Boeing, or Merck, or any of the storied firms whose shares make up retirement nest eggs and college funds across our divided land, companies known not only for their progressive giving and canny political stances but also for cheating and abusing their workers, duping their customers, destroying the environment, selling goods that don't work, manufacturing cars and drugs and planes that kill, profiting in ever newer, ever more ingenious ways off the bait and switch of the permanent corporate lie, namely, that the customer--rather than profit at any and all human cost--is king."
"For all the literary speculation about her secret summations brought me to see how little I really knew her and confronted me with the deepest resentment of my life--that despite the daily demonstrations of love, the doting, the sacrifices, the unceasing maternal care, I never truly felt loved by her. I'd never felt loved because I'd never known who was loving me and never felt certain she knew whom or what she was loving."
"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."
"Even suffrage was monetized, true political power lying not in the ballot box but in one's capacity to write a check. We were now customers first and foremost, not citizens, and to buy was our privileged act."
"We were a nation in thrall to our own stupidity."
" 'They can put a man on the moon, but they can't solve health care in this country?' "
"As much as he'd always wanted to think of himself as American, the truth was he'd only ever aspired to the condition. Looking back, he said, he realized he'd been playing a role so much of that time, a role he'd taken for real. There was no harm in it; he'd just gotten tired of playing the part."
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Xenophobia, Alcoholism, Racism, Racial slurs, and Islamophobia
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