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nharamati 's review for:
Homeland Elegies
by Ayad Akhtar
Hell yes, Homeland Elegies.
A kind of American Pastoral for a time that has perhaps outgrown both the American and the pastoral, replete with ingenuous enthusiasm, academic rigour and mystical peregrinations, cleverness and bawdy sex and reading lists, cris de coeur and confidence tricks; and with deep, sustained thought – a meditation on filial guilt, Islam, social contract theory, masculinity, the shaping and shapeshifting of collective identity, the roosting chickens of a nightmare deferred. It reverberates, it incites. It is muscular and irascible. It is untender. It is a 21st century love story between (what else?) a man and his context, a man and his conscience, an intelligence that fiercely refuses to suffer the fools of its own false gods. In his answer, of sorts, to the question posed after 9/11 by Toni Morrison: How can it be possible to properly mourn, with a mouth full of blood? Akhtar, unabashed native son, has written a denunciation of American exceptionalism; and, in triumphant paradox, a paean to it.
Tracing the line from the moral insouciance of the American ‘founding fathers’ to the unfettered predatory financial adventurism of the 1980s, from the cynical decades of Cold War gamesmanship to the consequent rise of Al-Qaeda, Akhtar evinces an apparent desire to fulminate conversationally, academically, in occasional declamatory ecstasy as a sort of outsider national conscience; Homeland Elegies is sung to the rhythms of an unapologetically Midwestern heart, its lungs now pumping the perfumed air of yesteryear’s Abbottabad, now howling themselves hoarse at a Badgers game. This book interrogates contemporary America in all its tangled nuance – the same America in which, not a decade ago, a smug campaigning Democrat could unironically proclaim, “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” – without falling prey to easily reductive declarative statements; a tall order, to be sure.
Homeland Elegies is a bravura act of self-mythology; a gauntlet thrown at the flabby monolith of contemporary public discourse – the suicidally clamorous landscape in which, as the novel’s belligerent Everyman puts it, authenticity is “measured now in decibels” —; a corrective; a fractured lovesong; and a romping treatise in which a macabre sort of hilarity is never long missing (the direct consequence of a life of neoliberal apoligism is sometimes, as it turns out, syphilis). The book’s targets include: the sentimental, revisionist atavism of contemporary Islam, Christianity, capitalism, liberal democracy; the failure of Medicare; the reactionary disenchantment of immigrants; the homicidal excesses of nationalist mythmaking; the petty myth of a self-governing market; Akhtar excoriates intellectual laziness wherever he finds it, from Ivy League lecture halls where the fragile children of a dwindling middle class are saddled with a lifetime’s worth of irremediable debt, to the bacchanalian reception rooms in which the fine line between modern-day courtier and courtesan blurs into nonexistence. Here, we see described the lust for power, the mercenary intertwining of capitalistic and sexual greed, the unbridled onanism of the so-called American dream; this elegy is not for late capitalism itself, but for those who believed in the promise of its snakeoil, who had the temerity – or the naked, brazen hope – to imagine that the depredations of Flint were not prefigured in the homeland’s founding, foundational act of mass murder in the name of material gain. And all this is taken on with a fluency in the language of dreams and of bankers, of urban academics and smalltown cops, of Punjabi grandmothers, Wall Street sex trade workers, and Pennsylvanian imams.
The rich, maddening entanglements and contradictions that rule and texture our lives are both the fodder of great fiction, and the fruit that it bears. If Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced was a conversation starter; Elegies is the conversation itself.
A great & needed book.
A kind of American Pastoral for a time that has perhaps outgrown both the American and the pastoral, replete with ingenuous enthusiasm, academic rigour and mystical peregrinations, cleverness and bawdy sex and reading lists, cris de coeur and confidence tricks; and with deep, sustained thought – a meditation on filial guilt, Islam, social contract theory, masculinity, the shaping and shapeshifting of collective identity, the roosting chickens of a nightmare deferred. It reverberates, it incites. It is muscular and irascible. It is untender. It is a 21st century love story between (what else?) a man and his context, a man and his conscience, an intelligence that fiercely refuses to suffer the fools of its own false gods. In his answer, of sorts, to the question posed after 9/11 by Toni Morrison: How can it be possible to properly mourn, with a mouth full of blood? Akhtar, unabashed native son, has written a denunciation of American exceptionalism; and, in triumphant paradox, a paean to it.
Tracing the line from the moral insouciance of the American ‘founding fathers’ to the unfettered predatory financial adventurism of the 1980s, from the cynical decades of Cold War gamesmanship to the consequent rise of Al-Qaeda, Akhtar evinces an apparent desire to fulminate conversationally, academically, in occasional declamatory ecstasy as a sort of outsider national conscience; Homeland Elegies is sung to the rhythms of an unapologetically Midwestern heart, its lungs now pumping the perfumed air of yesteryear’s Abbottabad, now howling themselves hoarse at a Badgers game. This book interrogates contemporary America in all its tangled nuance – the same America in which, not a decade ago, a smug campaigning Democrat could unironically proclaim, “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” – without falling prey to easily reductive declarative statements; a tall order, to be sure.
Homeland Elegies is a bravura act of self-mythology; a gauntlet thrown at the flabby monolith of contemporary public discourse – the suicidally clamorous landscape in which, as the novel’s belligerent Everyman puts it, authenticity is “measured now in decibels” —; a corrective; a fractured lovesong; and a romping treatise in which a macabre sort of hilarity is never long missing (the direct consequence of a life of neoliberal apoligism is sometimes, as it turns out, syphilis). The book’s targets include: the sentimental, revisionist atavism of contemporary Islam, Christianity, capitalism, liberal democracy; the failure of Medicare; the reactionary disenchantment of immigrants; the homicidal excesses of nationalist mythmaking; the petty myth of a self-governing market; Akhtar excoriates intellectual laziness wherever he finds it, from Ivy League lecture halls where the fragile children of a dwindling middle class are saddled with a lifetime’s worth of irremediable debt, to the bacchanalian reception rooms in which the fine line between modern-day courtier and courtesan blurs into nonexistence. Here, we see described the lust for power, the mercenary intertwining of capitalistic and sexual greed, the unbridled onanism of the so-called American dream; this elegy is not for late capitalism itself, but for those who believed in the promise of its snakeoil, who had the temerity – or the naked, brazen hope – to imagine that the depredations of Flint were not prefigured in the homeland’s founding, foundational act of mass murder in the name of material gain. And all this is taken on with a fluency in the language of dreams and of bankers, of urban academics and smalltown cops, of Punjabi grandmothers, Wall Street sex trade workers, and Pennsylvanian imams.
The rich, maddening entanglements and contradictions that rule and texture our lives are both the fodder of great fiction, and the fruit that it bears. If Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced was a conversation starter; Elegies is the conversation itself.
A great & needed book.