Homeland Elegies

“Trump was no aberration or idiosyncrasy, as Mike saw it, but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we’d allowed ourselves to become. Trump had just felt the national mood, and his particular genius was a need for attention so craven, so unrelenting, he was willing to don any and every shade of our moment’s ugliness, consequences be damned.”

“America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought.”

Akhtar, an award-winning playwright, was born on Staten Island to Pakistani physicians. His father, a cardiologist, treated Donald Trump, in the early '90s for an irregular heartbeat. He became show more infatuated with the man and began to drink the capitalistic kool-aid, leading to his own downfall. The author has chosen a unique narrative structure for this novel, blending fact and fiction. It is an American pastoral, with looks at identity, hope and dispossession. It also explores the immigrant experience, post- 9/11.
The writing is excellent. Smart and insightful. I had to reach for a dictionary, more than once. A book for the times and another top read from 2020. show less

The story is well written and intellectually challenging. Akhtar writes in a form of meta fiction where the protagonist has his name and many reference points match those of the author, but cautions that this is a story and not autobiography. The narrative unfolds in various stories about his life, from growing up in Wisconsin with a father, a renowned heart specialist who once cared for Trump, to a mother who pined to go back to Pakistan and grieved over the murder of the man she truly loved. There are scenes of Akbar's own education from his aunt in Pakistan to college professors, one of whom convinces his to record his dream. We read of his economic understanding of the world according to Robert Bork’s contributions to the show more elimination of checks on private enterprise, and how he benefits from the insider market help of a friend. In addition there are personal stories about his experiences as Muslim after 9/11 and his ventures into romance. After reading the novel I happened upon an interview on a podcast called Tin House where the author further impressed with his sheer intellectual bounty of reflections and his ability to articulate how his reading and education shaped his writing.
NYT
For Ayad Akhtar, the Trump presidency has led to “Homeland Elegies,” a beautiful novel about an American son and his immigrant father that has echoes of “The Great Gatsby” and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life...
There’s a lot more in this novel. There is good writing about Salman Rushdie and Edward Said (one of the narrator’s aunts really wanted to get him into bed) and syphilis and hoof stew and Scranton, Pa., and screenwriting, among many other things...
Homeland Elegies” is a very American novel. It’s a lover’s quarrel with this country, and at its best it has candor and seriousness to burn.

I would highly recommend this book but only for the reader that will give it the attention it will need.
Lines:
I date my mother's intensifying anti Americanism to that summer, the summer when, in response to attacks on two US embassies in East Africa, Bill Clinton bombed a Sudanese medicine factory. When Mother-herself a doctor trained in the Third World-learned that the factory had been responsible for producing every ounce of Sudan's tuberculosis medications, she was particularly incensed. She already despised Clinton for his indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky, and the attack on the factory came three days after Clinton's disastrous address in which he admitted he'd been lying about the affair all along. She saw in this sequence a murderous cynicism: an American president under political siege distracts the nation by killing Muslims.”

It was from her that I first heard the analogy comparing love and arranged marriages to kettles of water pitched at different temperatures: the former already boiling, with no chance to get any hotter; the latter cold at the outset, requiring steady application to be sure but with ample room to heat up over the years.”

The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their worst.”

Because being American is not about what they tell you—freedom and opportunity and all that horseshit. Not really. There is a culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all the well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship—and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you really belong.”

Obama's victory had turned out to be little more than symbolic, only hastening our nation's long collapse into corporate autocracy, and his failures had raised the stakes immeasurably. 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, as Mike saw it, but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we'd allowed ourselves to become. Sure, you could read the man for metaphors-an unapologetically racist real estate magnate embodying the rise of white property rights; a self-absorbed idiot epitomizing the rampant social self-obsession and narcissism that was making us all stupider by the day; greed and corruption so naked and endemic it could only be made sense of as the outsize expression of our own deepest desires-yes, you could read the man as if he were a symbol to be deciphered, but Mike thought it was much simpler than all that. Trump had just felt the national mood, and his particular genius was a need for attention so craven, so unrelenting, he was willing to don any and every shade of our moment's ugliness, consequences be damned. “ show less

An unusual book: Is it fiction? Is it a memoir? Is it a series of essays? Is it a critique of American culture and values? Is it a book about what it means to be an American, or what it means to be Muslim in America? To me, Homeland Elegies was all of this and more. This book made me think, and think hard. I learned a lot from reading it, and I believe some of its messages will be in my mind for a long time.

Akhtar is an extremely talented writer who depicts, with great honesty and occasional humor and warmth, a variety of very different settings, people, and viewpoints. He obviously draws from his own life and personal experiences to "write what he knows."

I was drawn to this book in part because a year ago, early in the pandemic, I show more was looking for books from my local library that I could download from the safety of my home. The pickings were slim, and I ended up reading his earlier novel (which also reads a lot like a memoir), American Dervish. I didn't know anything about his work as a playwright when I started reading that book; I picked it merely because it was set in a region I know (Wisconsin) and the book was available. I enjoyed American Dervish quit a bit, and was excited to see he had written another book (Homeland Elegies).

One of the parts of Homeland Elegies which I found most compelling takes place in a small town not too far from where I live. The narrator mentions he likes to visit small-town Wisconsin libraries and give them money. It feels curiously resonant to me that I first discovered this author in my own small-town Wisconsin library. show less

In his opening letter to the reader, the author shares that he wrote this book “in something of a fever dream” following the death of his mother, the election of Donald Trump and when his father was showing signs of decline. He wanted to reflect on what had brought his parents from Pakistan to America fifty years earlier, their lives, their hopes and dreams for themselves, as well as for their children, whose homeland was America, how the country had changed and what those changes had meant for all of them. However, he insists that this is a novel, not a work of autobiography, that “as a writer who has always felt the need to deform actual events enough to be able to see them more clearly, I have not resisted the inclination show more here.”
When I read this, and knowing that the narrator of the story shares the same name, personal history and professional career as the author, I did wonder whether I’d feel constantly distracted, maybe even irritated, by wanting to try to separate fact from fiction. However, I needn’t have worried because the author’s observations, whether of family relationships, national or global events, political manoeuvrings, racial and religious bigotry, xenophobia, the vast divide between the rich and the poor, the debt culture, sex, the death of the American Dream (and much, much more) felt not only unsparingly honest, but also disturbingly recognisable. Even if not everything described had been experienced by the author, it felt without doubt that they had happened to someone and that underpinned the story with a disturbing authenticity.
The story is divided into eight chapters which move backwards and forwards in time and place, incorporating a huge number of themes. These range from deeply personal reflections on family relationships and conflict, a man struggling to discover who he is in a world which defines him by the colour of his skin and being a Muslim, tensions between a son born in America and his immigrant father, to almost essay-like analyses of the wider social, political and economic issues which have shaped America, as well as the rest of the world, in recent decades. This could have felt disjointed but for me it never did because it allowed the author to demonstrate the impact this inextricable intertwining of the personal and the political has on his characters’ lives. I found that this sense of a ‘wholeness’ was reinforced by the two short chapters which ‘book-ended’ the story. The first, ‘Overture: America’, showed the narrator as a student, with his benign views about his country of birth already being challenged by the prescient observations of one of his professors. The second, ‘Free Speech: A Coda’, showed him and that same professor reunited as, together, they address a group of her current students against a culture in which feeling able to speak freely is becoming ever-more difficult.
Throughout the story the author’s prose is supremely eloquent, passionate and thought-provoking. Although it’s immediately engaging, compelling and page-turning in its intensity, nevertheless, as I was reading I found myself needing to stop frequently, either to think about something which I found challenged me to think about something in a different way, or just to re-read a section which so clearly and precisely captured what had led to a particular moment in history. Just one example: his reflections on Trump’s unexpected, to many, rise to power made total sense when seen against the background of an increasingly ‘corporate autocracy’ the pursuit of personal wealth and rampant consumerism, all of which had led to an even wider divide between the richest and the poorest, leaving so many Americans feeling disenfranchised, scared and angry. Trump had accurately read the national mood and knew exactly what promises to make to make their lives better, careless of whether or not he’d be able to make good on them. As I was reading, I was reminded of some of the parallels in Britain, where a similar feeling of disillusionment and marginalisation had led to the 2016 referendum and Brexit. However, from start to finish of this remarkable story there are many similar examples of the author’s skill in teasing-out the salient points of all of his arguments and observations. His portrayal of a narrator who was prepared to examine, often with brutal honesty, his own attitudes, prejudices and beliefs added to his moral authority to challenge and question those of other people.
An elegy is a song of mourning, a reflection on what has been lost and Homeland Elegies has a sense of loss and mourning running through its core. By the time I’d finished reading I felt that I’d seen not only into the heart and soul of the narrator’s life, his struggles with identity and how to present himself to a world which viewed him with suspicion, but also into the heart and soul of a nation, and a world, which has lost its moral compass and was so profoundly changed by 9/11. This is such an insightful, challenging and thought-provoking story (although it does also contain some very humorous moments!) that it feels impossible to encapsulate its complexity in a short review. What I can do is urge you to read it and discover for yourself the insights this story offers.
Ayad Akhtar won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with his play Disgraced, about the challenges faced by upwardly mobile Muslim Americans in the post-9/11 era – I believe his superb Homeland Elegies would be a worthy winner of second Pulitzer.
With thanks to the publisher and NB for my copy in exchange for an unbiased review – I wish I could give it more than 5*! show less

Homeland Elegies is a sort of hybrid book. While it's listed as fiction, the author is writing in a variation of his own voice about experiences that overlap significantly with the experiences of his own life. Homeland Elegies explores the evolution of Pakistani-American identity over the last twenty years. The book alternates between narrative and reflection, so in places it reads like a novel; in other places it reads like a collection of essays (it never really reads as fully fictional, but I don't think that was one of the writer's goals).

Homeland Elegies offers a detailed, thoughtful exploration of several topics: the separation of India and Pakistan; the evolving U.S. relationship with the group that would come to be known as the show more Taliban; the complexities of Pakistani-American life before 9/11 and the immense layers of complexity that 9/11 added to that identity. Akhtar is a thinker. He picks at details, unpacks and explores them; he draws connections across time and topic. If you like that kind of wondering about self and world, you will absolutely love this this title.

I received a free electronic ARC of this title from the publisher for review purposes. The opinions are my own. show less

A memoir of pre-/post 9/11 set mostly in America, but also in Pakistan. A brilliant mix of factual memoir and fictional fancy that takes us into the heart of our nation's darkness - warts and all. Chock full of digressions both personal and philosophical, Akhtar shows us what it's like to be a Muslim and a person of color who is constantly a victim of suspicion. This is a chronicle of his effort to understand his family's motives for supporting Trump and balance his own desire to be a writer against his family’s cultural expectations. He drifts in and out of interior musings and blends in exterior events to construct a microcosm that sheds much light on macrocosmic modern-day dilemmas. This is an unrelenting self-examination that show more exposes the impossible American Dream as a mirage and shows us why many of the divisions in our country exist. Highly recommended. show less

Homeland Elegies is the story of the American-born son of Pakistani immigrants whose faith in America is challenged by Donald Trump and the xenophobia he faces. His father was once Trump’s doctor and the gloss of knowing him long ago lets him ignore the anti-Muslim bigotry, assuming he means other Muslims, not ones like him. His mother has never been quite so trusting of America and after her death, before the book begins, he learns more about her dissatisfaction.

The narrator shares a name, personal history, and public career with the author. This makes it difficult to separate the fact from fiction. The prologue or “Overture” is as excellent a precis of where we are and how we got here as you will find. I loved and recognized it show more as speaking to me, but I imagine any conservative would close the book at the end of it and never pick it up again.

The story ranges far and wide in time to the times when the US helped the mujahadeen in Afghanistan to the time they viewed them as enemies. This narrative is captured in the story of his parents’ best friend who opens a clinic back home, one that the US forces use as base and then bomb as a terrorist cell. The entire arc of friendship and enmity in one person’s life.

This is a story of family and conflict, of father and son not understanding each other and finding their way toward mutual peace and respect. It is beautifully done and gives insight to the meaning of family and of difference.

The language in this book is extraordinary. I reached for a dictionary a few times, not because I could not understand these new words in context. I could, but sometimes a new word has a precision that the easier word might not have. He is that kind of author, he does use unfamiliar words, but not to show off, but in order to be precise. Besides, thanks to him I learned tohubohu, which means that which is empty and formless, chaos, utter confusion. Wow, one word for the Trump presidency.

Homeland Elegies is extraordinary. I loved it, even though at times I rolled my eyes, recognizing the common social media arguments. For example, he has a conversation with a Trump-supporting Black man who gives the traditional “what have Democrats delivered” though, in the end, the reality is he likes the lower taxes and doesn’t believe any party can do anything about racism. I cannot imagine a xenophobe or conservative reading this book at all. It is too confrontational for them. It is not going to promote understanding and rapprochement.

But why do we ask immigrants to do that? Why can’t they be angry and express that anger? He is asked why he stays and says it’s because it is home, but why is he asked? He was born here. So was I and I hate how our society is structured. Nobody is going to ask me why I don’t go back to Sweden though my family immigrated only one generation earlier than his. This is a book that asks us important questions. Sadly, we have far too few good answers.

Homeland Elegies will be released on September 15th. I received an ARC from the publisher through Shelf Awareness

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