Homeland Elegies
(Little, Brown, $28)
The only disingenuous passage in Ayad Akhtar’s remarkable new book might be an early declaration by the author that he has written a novel, not autobiography, said Ron Charles in The Washington
Post. Homeland Elegies is in fact “a phenomenal coalescence of memoir, fiction, history, and cultural analysis,” one that serves as a sweeping portrait of post-1979 America as seen by one insightful citizen. Akhtar, a New York–born, Wisconsin-raised son of Pakistani-immigrant doctors, won a Pulitzer Prize several years ago for his drama Disgraced. Whatever category this book falls into, “it would not surprise me if it wins him a second.”
Though presented as a novel, said Hari Kunzru in The New York Times, Homeland Elegies “often reads like a series of personal essays, each one illustrating yet another intriguing facet of the narrator’s prismatic identity.” That narrator, also named Ayad Akhtar, might be a contemporary Walt Whitman if not for his feeling that he is denied full membership in the American story precisely because he, too, “contains multitudes.” Born in 1970, he can’t escape how the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and the 9/11 terrorist attacks altered how he, as a brown-skinned American of Muslim heritage, is perceived by fellow Americans. His father, who emerges as the book’s most memorable creation, had forever preached American exceptionalism, served for a time