No way out
“An impossible dream was better than no dream at all,” proclaims Elsie Kuzavinas, one of the struggling protagonists of Xhenet Aliu’s thrilling debut novel, “Brass.” As she did in her first stellar collection of stories, “Domesticated Wild Things,” Aliu focuses on the ones who don’t belong, the downtrodden, the immigrants and, in this case, a single mother and her stubborn teenage daughter, both living a nickel-and-diming kind of life in Waterbury Conn., a onetime brass manufacturing capital of the world that long ago showed its tarnish.
“Brass” starts with Elsie, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, recounting her astonishing, simmering-withsecrets story, starting back when she was young and working at the Betsy Ross diner, owned and operated by an Albanian family, who fled their country for the American dream. Elsie quickly meets and falls for Bashkim, an Albanian line cook, who is certain that the special investments he made back in Albania will soon make him rich. But then, discoveries explode like firecrackers. Elsie learns that Bashkim is married, and his wife still lives in Albania, and though he insists that his wife has no thought of ever leaving, nor will he return, Elsie can’t help but wonder: What happens if his wife changes her mind?
Complicating things even more, Elsie finds herself pregnant. To her surprise, Bashkim wants her to have the child, for them to be a family and live on the money he’s sure is coming to him. Elsie actually dares to hope a happy ending for herself. But something darker begins to happen instead — and slowly, over the chapters of the book, she reveals the truth, and what it will all mean for both her and her daughter.
Luljeta, Elsie’s daughter, has a story to tell, too. She knows she’s her mother’s sole reason for getting up and working so hard, something she resents. She yearns to know her father, but the only thing Elsie will reveal is that he’s a no-good jerk who fled back to Albania after a green card fiasco, while Luljeta was still just a promise in Elsie’s belly. Elsie wants Luljeta to be the first in the family to have it good, to be off government assistance, but Luljeta’s plan is to get into New York University and live in New York, “the only city that matters.” When she doesn’t get accepted, she’s forced to settle for a job at the Betsy Ross, just like her mom, a world of smalltime lives and dead ends. But the Betsy Ross isn’t all greasy spoon and transients. It provides tantalizing clues to her father’s whereabouts in Houston, and Luljeta begins to wonder if her father might be someone worth knowing, someone who might help her succeed. With the help of Ahmet, an Albanian teen who is sweet on her, she gets on the road to find the past she’s been yearning for, and the father she never knew.
The writing blazes on the page, shifting dramatically back and forth from Elsie’s deliberate third person to Luljeta’s all-inclusive second person, telling her story as if it is happening to all of us. The narrative is also incredibly funny, sly, and always popping with personality. Waterbury, says Elsie, is “where training to be a nail art technician counted as postsecondary education.” Luljeta tells us that “before, your father was something whose existence you were told of so that you’d know how to avoid it, like poison ivy or crystal meth.” It’s funny, too, that the very Americannamed Betsy Ross diner is run by Albanians.
So much about the book is also extraordinarily timely, especially when it focuses on class and culture, and what they really mean. Bashkim’s mother might be an immigrant, but she still respects and clings to her old country habits, looking askance at the other Albanian expatriates who throw out their past because they want a shiny Americanized future. Waterbury, Conn., could be any small town desperately hanging on, a sour place of abandoned factories and the old brass mill. The jobs that are available (working factory assembly lines or at the local diners) don’t avail much of a future. “What is more lasting than brass?” the town slogan hopefully proclaims, but the denizens know the answer is plenty, including the toxic mud, the never-ending bills, the hope that dies right along with the town.
The ending of “Brass” may be somewhat bleak, but there are still spirited flickers of hope. Secrets spring open possibilities, and though lives might not change dramatically, mother and daughter begin to understand each other, discovering they are more alike than they are different. History, just like the future and all of its plans, can be revised. Yes, we might be lost from who and what we really are. But, as this audacious novel shows, we can — and we must — keep struggling to make our own place in the world.