Homeland Elegies

Critics have been puzzling over what this book actually is. Memoir, fiction, autofiction, autobiography, metafiction, non-fiction? A mix of all of the above? However you choose to label it, Homeland Elegies is a terrific story. Akhtar mixes love for the idea of America with rage at its imperfections and sadness at how far we’ve slipped from whatever noble ideals we once held. Three major threads run through Homeland Elegies. First there’s the family dynamic. Akhtar’s mother and father emigrated to Wisconsin from Pakistan. His mother never adapts to America, forever mourning the loss of her homeland. His father is an unforgettable character, a talented surgeon with large appetites who throws himself enthusiastically into the American pool without ever quite learning how to swim in it. Second, we get a broader look at the Muslim experience in America from the author’s encounters with high-achieving immigrants and their children. They’ve mastered the economic system while staying skeptical about the culture that props it up. Finally, there’s Akhtar’s own life story – upper-middle class kid in Wisconsin, struggling writer in New York, globetrotting public intellectual rubbing shoulders with marquee names in politics, arts and tech. The author tells us he admires Phillip Roth, and in many ways he’s the Muslim equivalent of Roth. He has that same intensity, verbal dazzle and willingness to tip over the table and smash the china at Sunday family dinner. Like Roth, he gets excoriated for telling tales and revealing secrets, most of all for confessing his doubts to outsiders and unbelievers. Akhtar has the courage to understand and acknowledge his own desires, be they noble or sordid, and the intelligence to put them into a cultural-historical context. Homeland Elegies is brilliant in its analysis of how narcissistic self-interest and unrestrained capitalism have poisoned American culture and led to the decline of hope and upward mobility in the working and middle class. Whether or not it’s a novel, this story is urgent and compelling and a must read for anyone trying to sort through their feelings about our increasingly unhinged country.

During interviews, Ayad Akhtar equivocates on how much of himself inhabits his narrator, despite both having the same name and background. His opinion of the current occupant of the White House is clear, spelled out early in the book, fleshed out as the book progresses. He has said he wanted to describe what it meant to be judged by strangers based solely on his skin color and preconceived ideas regarding his heritage, nevermind his actual history of being born in New Jersey and raised in the midwest. Enough has been written about the bombastic blowhard that need not be gone over again, but reading this account of life in America by a prize-winning, Shakespeare loving American, and the sly and not so sly insults and remarks hits like a jab to the gut. The effect on his father, a respected cardiologist who once treated a far different tRump 30 years ago, is even more telling. As Ayad puts it: \”Father\’s enthrallment …, first nascent, then ascendant, then euphoric, then disappointed, then betrayed and confused, and finally exhausted…\” says it all.

What a story. Wonderful. There are in a sense a couple will told stories here. The one I found most exciting is Akhtar’s reading of where America has wandered in the last few decades (opening on page 232), where Robert Bork managed to send us, along with generous help from other, laying down the America my generation knew of healthy small towns, family farms, bustling civic activities and public schools and interactive political parties. To his biting account of all that disappearing and the fractured reality of current times where ‘who we are’ is problematic: A gorgeous rendering. He wisely avoids questions of what is to come. The other centers on his biographical development as a ‘brown man,’ and a Muslim post 9/11 and the tenderness and confluence of pride and conflict in that community with unsettling results; as Ayad himself is judged as artist and antagonist in that world. He searches well for himself in that rendering. Don’t miss it, if open minded.

Vibrant and candid writing. A tale that dives deep yet remains relatable and combines fact with fiction unbeknownst to the reader. The protagonist has the same name as the author. What we don’t know is how much of the character’s story is based on real life. It makes reading that much more intriguing. A writer, a playwright, who has yet to find himself or his success, is yearning for his work to settle into what he knows it can be and perhaps to settle into who he is as a Pakistani-American, somewhat at odds with his immigrant parents who, after years in this country, still don’t quite feel at home. Woven into the story is Ayad’s father’s fascination with pre-presidential Trump. The good doctor is a specialized cardiologist who treats Trump and once in his care, he soon becomes enamored with this man whom he believes to be the epitome of success. The doctor is driven beyond his Hippocratic Oath to become the All-American – physician, real estate investor, and bragger of sorts vis-à-vis their peripheral acquaintance, which will sustain him for years to come. Meanwhile, Ayad is fledgling to make ends meet as a writer in Manhattan. 9/11 has further shaken him. He doesn’t see himself the way others do. How can he with racism as rampant as it is. Where does he fit in, not in his own country nor his parent’s birthplace? At the core, money is pulling each of the characters. If they have it, they want more. If they don’t, they are striving for it. Once they get it, it will thrust them into a level of destruction. HOMELAND ELEGIES is more than the story of a man who can’t find his way. It is an introspective look at a family who has come undone and the reflection of what they have lost. A devastatingly brilliant portrait of America that serves as a cautionary tale of our time.

It felt like it gave me a ringside seat to a hugely important drama, some books you read and forget, not this one

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