Radical turn
Third in a trilogy of novels about successive generations of Kurdish men, Laleh Khadivi’s “A Good Country” is brilliant. Like her earlier books, it’s lyrical, and it works through many of the same themes (home, belonging, nation and masculinity). Even though it’s less formally experimental than the others, it may be the boldest of the three.
Elemental and powerful, Khadivi’s Faulknerian first novel, “The Age of Orphans,” begins in 1921 and recounts the story of Reza Khourdi, a Kurdish boy whose family is massacred by the Iranian shah’s army. He is taken in by them, and later deployed back to the Zagros Mountains to police his own people. “The Walking” takes place during the Iranian exodus at the start of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s reign in 1979. Periodically using the device of a chorus, it tells the story of Reza Khourdi’s son, Saladin, and how his love for American cinema leads him to Los Angeles as a refugee, trying to make it any way he can.
“A Good Country” starts in the fall of 2011 with a scene straight out of ordinary American adolescent experience — kids smoking marijuana. One of them, Rez Courdee, is Sal Courdee’s son. He’s an Iranian American teenager caught between multiple selves and two worlds, one being the world of white Laguna Beach teenage surfers and the other the world of his father, who worked his way up to become a head scientist for Merck Labs.
Sal is not unstable like his own father, but he’s harsher than the white fathers of Rez’s friends. He tells Rez, “Those boys, the ones you think are your friends, will always think of you as an outsider, as an immigrant, the foreign kid. If you go with them, try to be as they are, I will not be able to help you in that life.”
A surf trip to Mexico goes awry, and when his buddies blame Rez, they push him out of their world and back into the life his father wants for him. In this other life, he meets a charismatic young Syrian American man, Arash, and is introduced to Muslim teenagers more like him — smart, accomplished code switchers.
However, unlike Rez, Arash is one self, and it’s an appealing self. He gives out weed and pays for food, explaining that in Islam, “generosity is a big deal.” When another boy calls Rez’s former friends “OC neo-Nazis,” Arash says, “Come on, man, why you gotta talk like that? There’s no need,” and steers the conversation away. Rez observes he likes being with Arash, who moves “from place to place in a single mood, with a single perspective,” and that he feels something “bright, open possible” with him. All this brightness changes after the Boston Marathon bombing.
Never before religious, Rez becomes Reza, and learns about Islam from friends as a counterpoint to American youth culture. His desire for a good country, for the belonging that is supposed to come with nation, eventually leads him into a dark and horrible situation that will read as the most painful of ironies to those who’ve read the story of his Kurdish grandfather in “The Age of Orphans” or felt Sal Khourdi’s longing for America in “The Walking” (though it should be noted that each of the books in the trilogy can stand alone).
The remainder of the book is a tragic and affecting portrait of how radicalization can happen to an ordinary American, profoundly altering him. At one point, Arash’s brother, Javad, comments that the Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston terrorists, “are just dominoes, knocked down by all the dominoes before them, and today, they have knocked down the dominoes after them whether it is another inspired bomber, another fanatical anti-Islam party in Europe, some war or death, who knows? Only time will tell us.” And in the characters’ personal lives, the same tragic cause and effect is at work. Khadivi subtly dramatizes the intersecting social conditions that could cause a rupture between an individual and the world, leaving the individual more vulnerable to persuasion.
“A Good Country” harnesses the reader’s empathy to provide a degree of insight and understanding that nonfiction rarely provides and sets out one of the most convincing fictional accounts of radicalization I’ve read. Unlike some novels grappling with radicalism, however, it doesn’t duck hard questions. There’s no false blaming of mental illness or misogyny or religion.
“A Good Country” is a courageous and important conclusion to a magnificent trilogy. It suggests that what’s saddest and most chilling about radicalization is that it arises from deep inside the human condition itself, from the thirst all humans have for connection and meaning. Without these, anyone can be lost.