Month: March 2022

I know that all of you have been breathlessly waiting to find out what I’ve been reading and what books I recommend, but I’ve been busy. I have, however, had the opportunity to finish a couple of books you might want to consider.

Ayad Akhtar’s ‘novel’ comes highly recommended. It was one of NYT’s ten best books of the year, a ‘best book of 2020’ by the Washington Post, and recommended by many others. According to Salman Rushdie it is “Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.”

In an introductory note to readers, Akhtar, a Pulitzer prize winning playright of Pakistani heritage claims, “This is not a work of autobiography. . . . This is a novel.” That’s the only disingenuous passage in this book. Let’s take a look. The narrator of the book is a man named Ayad Akhtar, son of Pakistani doctors who writes a Pulitzer prize winning play about a Muslim American. Hmmm.

Actually, one of the most interesting things about this book is the tension between what’s real and what’s made up. It’s an amazing book, the story of being a Muslim in America after 9/11. It’s kind of a picaresque book moving from one seemingly unrelated chapter to another. There are interesting themes about how the gods of finance in America and debt has ruined countless millions of lives to the constant distrust by so many in what we’re being told.

When the narrator and his father visit, in 2008, relatives in Abbottabad, best known for sheltering Osama bin Laden until he was killed by American soldiers in 2011, one of his uncles gives him a lecture from his uncle about the tactical genius of 9/11, and his vision of a Muslim community based on principles espoused by the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, one that “does not bifurcate its military and political aspirations.” The narrator, like Akhtar, is an American-born dramatist, whose own politics have been formed by a childhood in suburban Milwaukee and a liberal arts education. While he disagrees with his uncle, sitting in the man’s Raj-era bungalow with William Morris wallpaper, the narrator finds it easiest to listen without giving an opinion. His father, a staunch American patriot and future Trump voter, is enraged. “Trust me,” he snaps on the taxi ride home, “you don’t have a clue how terrible your life would have been if I’d stayed here.”

These kinds of tensions run throughout the book. At one point, the narrator identifies as part of the “Muslim world,” noting that “despite our ill usage at the hands of the American empire, the defiling of America-as-symbol enacted on that fateful Tuesday in September would only bring home anew to all the profundity of that symbol’s power.” Then, in the same paragraph, he switches, to “speak as an American” of how “the world looked to us … to uphold a holy image, or as holy as it gets in this age of enlightenment.” The paradox is that only people who see the United States as “the earthly garden, the abundant idyll” would have such a jealous compulsion to destroy it. On either side of the ideological one-way mirror, the spectacle of American exceptionalism mesmerizes.

The narrator’s own experience on 9/11 is mesmerizing. Seeing the devastation wrought by the disaster, his first thought is to donate blood to help the survivors. He goes to give blood at St. Vincent’s hospital but wets himself in terror after being harassed by an Islamophobic man on the way. o protect himself from further attacks, he steals a crucifix pendant from a Salvation Army store and wears it for several months, a camouflage that carries more than a tint of cultural shame. His Pakistani-American girlfriend is shocked when he confesses, years later. She could never wear a cross. “We bought flags,” she says.

Akhtar does not spare himself. A significant section of the book traces his compromising relationship with a Muslim hedge fund manager who lures Ayad into high society and gives him a lesson in predatory capitalism. Still, being Muslim means he’s always the ‘other’. The defining dilemma of his life, Ayad says, is that he’s “no longer a practicing — let alone believing — Muslim and yet still entirely shaped by the Islam that had socially defined [him] since 9/11.”

In one of the book’s many memorable set pieces, Ayad’s car breaks down while driving through Pennsylvania. His encounter with a state trooper and later a repair shop demonstrates what it means to be a potential terror suspect; to always be on one’s friendliest behavior; to shift, whenever possible, one’s lineage to India. “If all this sounds somewhat paranoid,” Ayad writes, “I am happy for you. Clearly you have not been beset by daily worries of being perceived — and therefore treated — as a foe of the republic rather than a member of it.” It’s a conflicted position. To mainstream white culture, he’s a Muslim willing to say what needs to be said; to some Muslims, he’s a self-loathing sellout who cashes in on ethnic stereotypes.

It’s a long, complex and fascinating book. I urge you to give it a shot. It will open your eyes to many things that perhaps you don’t think about often…or ever.

Set in 1980’s Ireland, this is another book about a kind of outsider – an outsider not because of his color or religion but because of his parentage.

Born to an unwed teen employed as a live-in maid by Mrs. Wilson — a kindly Protestant widow — Bill Furlong grew up in the elderly woman’s large, comfortable home, nurtured by his mentor’s generosity and her progressive ideas but clear-eyed about his illegitimate status as perceived by the town’s inhabitants.

Over time, like a Dickensian hero, Bill gains social acceptance as a hardworking coal merchant, marries Eileen — a woman from a middle class family — and becomes doting father to five smart, lovely daughters.

But the respectability that Bill has worked so hard to maintain, namely “to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people,” and to ensure his daughters’ success at St. Margaret’s — the only good Catholic school for girls in New Ross — often puts him in an existential funk. The nuns who run St. Margaret’s also run the Magdalene laundry in town, one of the infamous operations that enslaved and abuses so many Irish women who were perceived as ‘fallen women’, women who had a child out of wedlock, or behaved ‘inappropriately’ or did anything to violate the rigid rules imposed by the church and the Irish patriarchy.

Bill seeks transformation and eventually find the courage to challenge some of the status quo. His antagonist — the Good Shepherd Convent —represents not the spiritual realm but the world. While this institution claims to uphold love, faith, and charity, its capitalist operation of the town’s laundry business, in collusion with the Irish government to exploit and abuse downtrodden women, shows a ghastly betrayal of Christian ideals.

Visiting the convent to deliver coal, he happens upon one of the girls who are imprisoned there and, horrified by how she and others are treated by the nuns, finally finds the courage to do something.

It’s uncertain how Bill’s act of courage will impact his daughters — whose well-being has inspired his wish for radical change in the first place — over time. The gaps between Bill’s fictional 1985 act of resistance, the closing of the Magdalen laundries in 1996, and the Irish government’s belated apology to the victims in 2013, show that justice, sadly, takes decades to arrive.

This is a short book and an easy read. Give it a try.