“Homeland Elegies”: Chris Jones reviews Ayad Akhtar’s latest
Back in 2012, I interviewed Ayad Akhtar in front of a live audience at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. Akhtar was still a year away from winning the Pulitzer Prize for his dynamic drama “Disgraced,” but he had already released his potent first novel, “American Dervish,” an autobiographical account of his growing up in suburban Milwaukee as the feisty, vulnerable, fiercely intellectual, American-born child of two very complex immigrant doctors from Pakistan — neither of whom had fully understood their son’s determination to become a writer. Not that he really had any choice.
It was a very tense night. More of that in a moment. Know first that Akhtar since has raised the ante.
In Akhtar’s gripping (I hesitate to say “heart-stopping”) second autobiographical novel, “Homeland Elegies,” we learn, assuming the narrator can be believed, that Akhtar’s father, a Milwaukee cardiologist, once was flown in to tend to the 1997 heart palpitations of a patient named Donald J. Trump.
This fateful meeting, one of several, not only led to the doctor’s ultimately catastrophic embrace of what you might charitably call the art-of-the-deal view of America, but apparently evinced in Trump a genuine sense of personal gratitude. (Who even knew he was capable?) Since the future president was, the book alleges, long enthusiastic about the offerings of professional sex workers, he offered the naive and pliant cardiologist a certain phone number, leading not only to some 15 years of work for the woman the father reached on the end of the line, but to the son later discovering he had a halfsister in Queens.
So even for those of us who consider ourselves advanced students of Akhtar (also the author of the Broadway play “Junk”), the book reveals one heck of a lot we did not know, even if freely and imaginatively expressed under the safety blanket of fiction. (And, occasionally, dramatic scenes.)
Ever the lover of the self-protective paradox, Akhtar quotes Alison Bechdel in his epigraph: “I can only make things up about things that have already happened.”
Prior to this book, despite numerous interviews over the years, I didn’t know Akhtar had (apparently) become a multimillionaire, not from the theater, naturally, but after being let in on an initial public offering by a hugely wealthy Pakistani American entrepreneur and then selling for a quick but massive gain — an experience he put to work in the play
“Junk.” I wasn’t aware Akhtar had (apparently) been given syphilis either. Not sure I needed to know. But, to paraphrase an observation he makes several times in the novel, an honest reckoning with the failings of families and lovers requires an honest reckoning with oneself. And he does not stint on the details. Or the slobbering sex.
Back to that interview.
As we stood together in the wings, I remember Akhtar contorting his lean frame to peer out at the large audience and his eyes landing on a group of scowling Pakistani American women in the front row, brandishing copies of his book.
“Expect trouble,” he said with a smile. “They’re here.”
And out we went with his interviewer wondering whether he should bring up the Jewish reaction to Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith,” when that 1959 story was published in The New Yorker. (Roth, for the record, is one of Akhtar’s heroes along with Salman Rushdie, who returned the favor by blurbing “Homeland Elegies” with the word “unputdownable,” which, while accurate, is not a word you imagine Rushdie ever using.)
When we got to questions that night, I realized that the principal objection to Akhtar among some
‘Homeland Elegies’
By Ayad Akhtar; Little, Brown, 369 pages, $28, Sept. 15
Americans of the Muslim faith was, when you boiled it down, his willingness to be critical of his own community despite America still being largely hostile territory for immigrants of color.
In many ways, the morality of such criticism, even of self, is the main theme of “Homeland Elegies,” which describes a man seduced and spit out by a Trumpian American landscape that seemed to promise so much but ultimately sated a fine Pakistani mind with booze and casinos and predatory financial advice.
And thus the son is caught between anger at his homeland’s mercurial and dehumanizing antiintellectualism and profound frustration at the explosive dangers of most any theocracy, including the one that influenced his parents and other family members.
For the hassle at that interview wasn’t just all about airing dirty familial laundry, so to speak; it was Akhtar’s rationalist critique of Islam that caused much of the upset. He re-ups in “Homeland Elegies,” arguing, or re-arguing that the core teachings of the Prophet must be opened up to critical thinking.
Of course, these are not the glory days of critical thinking on either left or right, especially when it comes to race and religion. “Anyone who tells you they fully understand race in America in 2020 is either a charlatan or a boring person,” Thomas Chatterton Williams recently wrote on Twitter — and Akhtar most assuredly is of that view.
So one of the core assets of this fine and deeply moving piece of writing is the complexity of its thinking, its innate understanding that seeing the absurdity of worshiping American exceptionalism in this most incurious of nations does not mean you cannot also see the similar peril of subsuming one’s mind to a theocracy outside its borders.
Akhtar was massively influenced by an English teacher he met in college, a woman who taught him many things but most notably the essential act of seeing a piece of writing through the lens of its creator, not merely of the ephemeral moment. Her name here is rendered as Mary Moroni, a pseudonym (I believe) for Mary Cappello, who taught Akhtar at the University of Rochester before he transferred to Brown.
Mary functions in this work as a kind of guiding angel (Moroni indeed!) who taught Melville and Emerson, sure, but really just critical thinking. In the end, we see that she opened up the world to a formidable intellect (and sensualist) who grew up brown in the white Wisconsin suburbs and then spent years not just trying to find where he belonged, a trope, but also critiquing everything around him, especially all that was closest.
And having some fun and no small amount of financial success along the way. Good for him. He is a true artist.
In the book, Moroni, a true liberal, finds herself engulfed in Akhtar controversy when he comes back to her campus and tries to explain the muddle of politics and religion and money and race and desire to minds that think only in binary ways about, well, most everything.
In the end, it is her love that makes Akhtar finally able to say he is an American, for better or maybe for worse.