Far From Brooklyn

Alas, this is yet another book that I read a large portion of but did not finish. I’m not sure why. It’s strange to set aside a book with so much energy, intelligence, and wrath.

I was deeply engaged in the first section of the book, the story of the narrator’s father. Because this is 2021 of course this is autofiction (or, again, as I like to call it, the new anti-novel), the narrative is the actual story, I assume, of Ayad Akhtar’s real-life father, a well-known heart specialist who came to the US from Pakistan and embraced the go-go aspects of free-market capitalism and, maybe even more so, America’s liberal attitudes about drinking and sex, and basically lived it up until he ran his financial ship aground, and then, amazingly, returned to his high-powered medical specialty as if nothing had ever happened, other than betraying his wife and (briefly, it seems) shattering his son’s expectations of a fully-paid-for, freely experienced undergraduate education.

The father’s story was sufficiently unbelievable that I didn’t find it credible as fiction. In other words, it really had to be true. In particular there is a brief sidestory involving pre-presidential Donald Trump that is awkwardly cartoonish, with a not-particularly-good imitation of the way Trump speaks. This seemed such an odd thing to include in the narrative that I set the book down to google the author’s father and yes, he was, it seems, a renowned cardiologist. To what extent the Trump story–or really anything else in the novel–is true or not, I don’t know.

The stories Akhtar tells sound true, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. There is first of all the story of treating Donald Trump, the upshot of which is… nothing? Or possibly the point is to allow Akhtar to air his grievance that his father voted for Donald Trump, and look what happened, Dad!

Later, Akhtar tells the story of his uncle, a military man who lives in Abbotabad of all places, the city in Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden hid for years, presumably with the connivance of the Pakistani military. The upshot of this story ends up also being to air a grievance: Look how the US screwed up in Afghanistan! They helped the mujahudeen but they fucked it all up!

Then there is the story of a broken down car and a corrupt state trooper (and his corrupt brother) who scheme to rip off Akhtar–who is driving, as I recall, a Saab, and who is extended, instantly, over the phone, a line of credit to cover the costs by his bank… I think the point of this story was, look what these racist bastards did to me!

Then there was the story of his mother, who had never loved his father, and the story of his aunt, a brilliant academic who is disgusted by Salman Rushdie’s infamous “The Satanic Verses,” the point of which is, I think, well, I don’t know, I think it is a way for Akhtar to work through some of his feelings about the concept of the prophet Muhammed.

All of these stories are memorable, or fairly memorable, which is a tribute to Akhtar’s skills, but they often smack of pedantry: Let me try to get this through your thick heads, American readers!

The book reminded me of–or I should say, it called to mind–Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” with which it shares a kind of existential yawp: “I live here, I belong here, why must I suffer these indignities when I have every bit as much right to life and liberty and happiness as you or anyone else!”

But with the Rankine book (for me at least), the accumulation of microaggression after microaggression has a gradually growing power that (again for me, at least) reaches a sort of crescendo of sympathetic despair. In the first pages of “Citizen,” I found myself responding, “Hmm, yes, I can see how that would be annoying, although I’m not entirely sure it’s fair to attribute it to racism…” That, in turn, gives way to, “God damn but that it’s terrible…” to finally a sense of exhausted rage at the torturous drip-drip-drip of racist indignities she describes.

With Akhtar, I didn’t feel that. I think he’s brilliant. But I didn’t find myself throbbing with sympathy for him. Who knows, maybe he would shrug and say he didn’t give a shit whether I care for him or not.

All that said, the book clearly “got to me” in the sense that I reacted to it strongly and remember quite a bit of it fully a month after setting it aside (having skimmed the second half). I will probably go back and read his first novel, “American Dervish,” although as I understand it goes over a lot of the same ground (the cardiologist father, the midwestern youth, etc.)

Photo credit: Billie Grace Ward