Fiction with lessons that go far beyond one’s comfort zone
I recently attended a significantly numbered reunion at my high school in an affluent, primarily white suburb of New York City. When it came time for the group discussion of how the place where we’d grown up had affected our lives, many felt compelled to mention the volunteer/social justice work they’d done, atoning, it seemed, for all the privileges we’d been afforded.
Some of the snarkier among us labeled it “virtue signaling,” but I felt the descriptions of work with the disenfranchised were, in large part, sincere — with the exception of one guy who, according to himself, was a combination of Desmond Tutu and Mahatma Gandhi.
I mention this to discuss the fact that I always love reading fiction about people and places outside my own experience. Yes, there are great novels about white middle-class and even wealthy characters, and their struggles and triumphs and despairs. (“The Great Gatsby,” anyone?) But it’s when I’m transported out of my own frame of reference into a totally different world that I get really excited.
That’s why I had trouble with Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel, “Our Country Friends,” the story of a group of friends who gather at a country house to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic. Granted, they’re not all white. The host, an extremely successful but now struggling Russian-born writer based on Shteyngart himself, is joined by Korean and Indian guests.
The novel is wildly funny, a la much of Shteyngart’s work, but I grew tired of the bad behavior of these privileged castaways. I personally know and like people who were fortunate enough to have fled to their homes in Sun Valley and the Hamptons once the pandemic hit. But knowing the tragic toll of COVID, especially among the dispossessed, I don’t find myself eager to read about the “haves” and the vintage wine and artisanal food they consume.
“Radiant Fugitives,” by Nawaaz Ahmed, the novel I picked up immediately following Shteyngart’s, really scratched the itch I had for something outside my experience. It’s the
It’s when I’m transported out of my own frame of reference ... that I get really excited.
story of Seema, a San Francisco activist, working for then-District Attorney Kamala Harris. She’s been exiled from her family in India since she came out as a lesbian. Her sister is a devout Muslim, her ex-husband (it’s complicated) a Black American.
One aspect of this novel that intrigued me, in addition to the fine writing, was Seema’s critical take on presidential candidate Barack Obama. She’s disillusioned, particularly in the wake of his failure to stand up against California’s Proposition 8, which aimed to ban same-sex marriage, calling him a “cautious technocrat.” Ahmed also describes how the son of Seema’s Muslim sister is becoming radicalized due to anti-Muslim violence in her home state of Texas.
Ahmed creates vivid, three-dimensional characters who are inexorably caught up in the reality of the larger political world. Their observations and perspective on the events that surround them gave me new understanding of how people with lives far outside my own bubble view our collective recent past.
Other novels I’ve enjoyed that have taken me into lives far removed from my own include Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West,” which tells the story of a couple forced to flee an unnamed country on the brink of civil war and live the life of refugees, arriving finally in a frightening but sadly plausible future version of the Bay Area.
I also love Imbolo Mbue’s work. “Behold the Dreamers” is the story of a hard-hit immigrant family from Cameroon living in New York City during the 2008 financial crisis. Her “How Beautiful We Were,” set in a fictional African village, tells of a community suffering from the devastation caused by an American oil company.
Getting back to novels set during the pandemic, I expect we’ll see a spate of them over the next several years. The whole notion of enforced pods is fertile territory for a novelist.
But for the time being, I’ll skip the stories of how the wealthy had to clean their own houses and forgo the weekly massage, instead seeking out books about people who, even before the pandemic, were living on the edge.