Ayad Akhtar's parents were immigrants. From Pakistan. They didn't fit the Ellis Island stereotype: both his mother and his father had medical degrees from a Pakistani university, and his father had become one of America's premier experts in a certain area of cardiology.
Ayad himself was born in New York, and grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee. His father was an atheist, but many of his relatives -- including the many family members still living back in Pakistan -- were devout Muslims. Ayad graduated from Brown University. As an adult, Ayad became a renowned playwright, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013.
Ayad is the narrator in the novel Homeland Elegies. He is also the author of the novel. All of the facts stated above are true -- true of both the author and the novel's narrator. Akhtar calls his book a novel, but it is written as a fictionalized memoir, or, more precisely, a fictionalized collection of essays. Without researching outside the book, I have no way of knowing how many of the events related are fictional and how many are autobiographical.
It probably makes no difference. As André Aciman has stated, while admitting that he had invented some events and emotions that he described in detail in his memoir Back to Egypt: "this fiction grounded me in a way the truth could never have done. This, to use Aristotle's word, is how I should have felt..." Whether the stories Akhtar tells are true or invented is irrelevant to the greater truths Akhtar attempts to tells us; his questionable "veracity" is of interest only, perhaps, to those intimates of the author who know the truth already. Akhtar has at least called his book a novel -- not a memoir.
Homeland Elegies -- note the plural -- is a series of meditations, from various perspectives, of what it means to be a person of Muslim background, living in America. He discusses the obvious problems, especially after 9/11, of having his fellow citizens consider him another murderous damn Arab. He describes the lives his parents and their parents had lived in Pakistan, and he takes us with him on visits to his parents' homeland. We learn of the increasing despair of Pakistanis as their nation becomes increasingly consumed by violence, and as its youth grow up eager for battle. As his Pakistani uncle explains:
The human being is a battling creature, beta. That will never change. To pretend otherwise is to delude ourselves. We fight as a way to make meaning of our lives. That is why protecting the citizens against war is always a recipe for long-term disintegration. The nation must be brought into the military mind-set.
His father despises this pessimistic view of human nature; Ayad quietly listens.
But this book is only incidentally concerned with despair in Pakistan, and the problems faced by Muslim immigrants in America. Ayad struggles to understand a deeper problem in American society, a problem in addition to the problems that always alienate immigrants from their new home -- religious intolerance, language differences, and poverty. He senses a problem that has caused even the majority of native-born Americans to experience an ever deeper despair .
This problem is an all-consuming materialism that pervades every aspect of American life -- and that is infiltrating all of Western culture. Its roots are not new; Walt Whitman worried 150 years ago that America was "ensnared in a materialism from which it couldn't seem to escape." But, Ayad was told by a friend, it has been accelerated by the anti-trust teachings of Judge Robert Bork, who taught that the only check on corporate power should be competition, and that achieving the resulting benefit to consumers was the only legitimate goal of anti-trust law. He rejected using anti-trust law to protect employees who would be laid off in a merger or other businesses that would be destroyed when forced to compete with giant corporations.
The result was the hollowing out of small towns we have observed during the last few decades.
Locality itself was in decline, as dollars were drained from the American heartlands and allocated to points of prosperity along the urban coasts. ... Towns were poorer, which meant schools were poorer, too. Public education started to crumble. So did the roads and bridges. There were fewer landowners giving less money to an ever-dwindling number of churches and charities. Everywhere you went, people poured into big box stores to spend less on things they had less money to buy. ... Suicide was on the rise, and so were drugs, depression, anger.
This describes my own small home town. "This country makes you a criminal for being poor," a family friend complains. And it prepared the way for Donald Trump.
Most Americans couldn't cobble together a week's expenses in case of an emergency. They had good reason to be scared and angry. They felt betrayed and wanted to destroy something. The national mood was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, nihilistic -- and no one embodied all this better than Donald Trump. Trump was no aberration or idiosyncrasy ..., but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we'd allowed ourselves to become.
Watching the movie It's a Wonderful Life on television, Ayad realizes that we had become exactly what the movie's hero had saved his home town Bedford Falls from becoming.
Coincidentally, the same problem was addressed in the papal encyclical Fratelli tutti, released this week:
Some people are born into economically stable families, receive a fine education, grow up well nourished, or naturally possess great talent. They will certainly not need a proactive state; they need only claim their freedom. Yet the same rule clearly does not apply to a disabled person, to someone born in dire poverty, to those lacking a good education and with little access to adequate health care. If a society is governed primarily by the criteria of market freedom and efficiency, there is no place for such persons, and fraternity will remain just another vague ideal.
Throughout the novel, Ayad discusses his relationship with his brilliant, cardiologist father. The father brought the family to America to take advantage of the greater opportunities that would be open to them. He succeeded, and became more fervently American than most Americans. The father met Donald Trump as a patient in 1993, and treated him for several years for heart irregularities that he felt might be more serious than they turned out to be. He became a devoted fan of the future president.
By 2016, the father was having doubts about his hero and his run for the presidency. The following year, he was sued for malpractice -- probably unfairly -- and the case was settled during trial by his insurer. He began gambling and drinking, and his son eventually learned that his dad had lost millions, everything he had, and his property was under foreclosure. Ayad's parents returned to Pakistan, where his father still owned some inherited land. His American Social Security payments provided an adequate standard of living. In earlier visits, the father had been sharply critical of Pakistan and the "backward" attitudes of his relatives. But Ayad could tell that his father, now, had never been happier. He told his son:.
"I had a good life there, so many good years. I'm grateful to America. It gave me you! But I'm glad to be back in Pakistan, beta. I'm glad to be home."
And Ayad? While he was giving a lecture at a small college, an upset member of the audience asked him why, since he was so critical of America, he didn't just leave.
"This is where I've lived my whole life. For better, for worse -- and it's always a bit of both -- I don't want to be anywhere else. I've never even thought about it. America is my home."
For both Ayad and his father, one's "home" isn't necessarily the place with whose policies you agree or disagree. It's ultimately where one's been reared and had his formative experiences.
Homeland Elegies is a complex book. Akhtar provides a useful timeline at the outset, but the story is presented in eight chapters and a "coda." Each chapter is, in a sense, a separate story with a different topic. The chapters fit together to provide a continuous narrative, although the narrative line seems at times lost in the details. It's a sophisticated form of story-telling, but is rich in insights about Pakistan, about Islam, about an immigrant's joys and tragedies -- and above all, about our American civilization and where we seem to be heading.
It's an absorbing book, and a sobering narrative.
My thanks to Little, Brown and Co. for a complimentary advance copy of this book.
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