Literature

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.

I recently finished reading Utopia Avenue, the latest by cult novelist David Mitchell (author of, among other things, Cloud Atlas). It’s longish – almost 600 pages in the hardcover and that’s not a bad thing because I enjoyed it. It is an expert historical novel about the ‘Swinging Sixties’ built around a ragtag group of young British musicians who come together and make music and, in the process, find themselves.

It’s fun from the beginning, seeing the band come together almost out of nothing. One day in 1967, Dean Moss, a bass player gets evicted from his flat and loses his job on the same day. Across town, a folk musician named ‘Elf’ has broken up from her lover and singing partner. A young music manager with a mission to create a new band from scratch finds these two and two others – drummer Peter Griffin and guitarist Jasper de Zoet to complete the quartet.

They are a motley crew. Dean Moss, the gorgeous, sex-addicted, vaguely Mick Jagger-ish bassist, has barely survived an abusive, down-at-heels childhood in Gravesend; Jasper, the binational, upper-crusty product of boarding schools, suffers from psychological problems that, at first, you’re tempted to diagnose as Asperger’s. (He has to self-consciously “act” his smiles on cue and “decipher” facial expressions, which to him are as “impenetrable as Sanskrit.”) It’s worth noting that Mitchell, who has written about his own son’s autism, avoids the term here. Elf Holloway, the band’s lone woman, culled from the folk circuit, is comfortably upper-middle-class and can’t understand why none of the guys she dates make her happy; Peter “Griff” Griffin, the gruff drummer, comes from a matey, blue-collar milieu in Hull. How they come together to play music is a mystery at the beginning.

Mitchell captures the tension between artists and their labels trying to divine the next turn of teen tastes. He re-creates the music shows in all their cringing giddiness. And the pages of “Utopia Avenue” are a veritable Who’s Who of the era — including the Who. Miraculously regenerated legends stroll through every chapter. Crazy cameos by young David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and so many others make this novel a night at the fantasy party you will never be invited to. There are in-jokes about the pop music world that will be catnip for fans: In one scene set on the roof terrace of the Chelsea Hotel, Joplin, who’s been talking to Elf about the struggles of women musicians, gets to give her own account of the act of fellatio that Cohen immortalized in his 1974 song “Chelsea Hotel #2.” They go to parties at which hip lesbians say things like: “I played ‘Wedding Presence’ so often, I wore out the track. It’s numinous, if I can use that word.”

There are a bunch of self-referential winks in the book. Mitchell fans will recognize that Jasper de Zoet has the same last name as Jacob de Zoet from one of his previous novels. De Zoet has issues and some history that, I think, distracts from the story but overall I liked the book. Mitchell does a good job of adding a sense of immediacy to the book and there’s a lot of intersection of words and feelings that move the story along. It’s an enjoyable read and a nice look back at the ‘Swinging Sixties’.