Feeling like an American

I doubt I can do justice to this very original, remarkable book. But here goes anyway.

Described on its cover as a novel, but somewhere between a memoir and an essay, Homeland Elegies is a scorching examination of the author’s own life and family, and of his country, America. Neither gets away unscathed.

Akhtar’s parents moved from Lahore to the United States in the 1960s, and in 1972 he was born on Staten Island. A few years later they moved to Wisconsin, where he grew up. His father was a doctor, his mother a home-maker.

One of the early tales in the book would be simply amusing if it were written before 2016, but now is loaded with symbology: his father’s interactions with Donald Trump. Trump, it turns out, had a heart issue in the early 1990s, and Akhtar’s father, an academic cardiologist who was a world-renowned specialist in a fairly obscure heart problem called Brugada syndrome, was called in. First-class flights to Newark and stays at the Trump Plaza Hotel followed. Everything that follows seems loaded with meaningful pointers towards Trump’s behaviour as President: Trump didn’t turn up for appointments, wasted Akhtar’s time but showed supposed solicitiousness for his comfort, boasted about himself (“I’m talented. I can say it right”), failed to accomplish his boast (“Oh, that sounds hard”), boasted about his hotel (“We redid those rooms when I bought the place. That hotel is a masterpiece, Doctor.”), gave Akhtar worthless gifts that he had got for free (“a small white box containing a LOVE LIFE! lapel pin”) and so on.

And in return, the writer’s father ‘would never forget the gesture’ and defends him fiercely through the 2016 campaign.

A breakfast place in Waukesha were we were the only nonwhites enjoying brunch the weekend after Trump entered the race with those infamous remarks about Mexican immigrants being rapists and murderers. “I don’t know what you’re so worked up about. He’s a showman. He’s drawing attention. He doesn’t really mean it.”

The Trump interactions, though revoltingly fascinating, luckily only fill a couple of chapters. The bulk of the book is really a searing examination of being American, especially for those who have Muslim names (whether they are personally religious or not) and who are brown-skinned. Akhtar has family friends who became more and more religious over time and eventually moved back to Pakistan (despite their children having decidedly mixed opinions about leaving America). He has an intellectual, literary aunt who drinks wine and encourages him to be a writer, but detests The Satanic Verses (“sickening, ad hominen attacks on the Prophet”). He has conversations with family in Pakistan about politics, America, war. Each of these provides fodder for Akhtar’s own detached, analytical opinions.

Then comes 9/11, and his brown-skinned, Muslim-named family is viewed with increasing suspicion. In 2010 he drives through Scranton, Pennsylvania, and has car trouble. A white state trooper interrogates him about whether his parents are Arab, sends him to a nearby town where he (at this point heavily in debt) is seriously ripped off by a repair shop owner in cahoots with the local police, has no choice but to pay the wildly inflated bill, and leaves.

I was lost and broke and felt persistently humiliated and under attack in the only country I’d ever known, a place that the more I understood, the less I felt I belonged. […] It would be another hour before I got to the city limits, but by then my mind would be made up; I was going to stop pretending that I felt like an American.

A couple of years later, Akhtar writes a play (Disgraced, 2012) that is produced in Chicago and New York and eventually wins the Pulitzer in 2013. He becomes very wealthy almost by chance, largely via an interaction with a Pakistani hedge-fund owner. This part of the novel, with a heavy dose of economic analysis and discussions of capitalism, was still well written, but less interesting to me. A later chapter discusses Robert Bork in some detail, and seems like a pointless digression: it is mostly a third-party analysis passed on by a black Hollywood agent.

When he turns the lens on himself and his family, he is unsparing. He writes about his parents’ inconsistencies, he ruthlessly describes his own moments of misogyny and sometimes violent interactions with women, his self-indulgent excesses, his avid delight in limousines and luxury, his ‘sexual fecklessness’ that led to a bout of syphilis, his online stalking of an ex-lover, and his father’s gambling, drinking and unfaithfulness. Heads-up: some readers might have less sympathy for the author after some of these passages.

Akhtar’s writing is insightful, unforced, opinionated, and riveting. On pretty much every topic, he has something intelligent, crisply worded, and thought-provoking to say.

I don’t think Mother ever felt at home here. She thought Americans materialistic and couldn’t understand what was so holy about the orgy of acquisition they called Christmas. She was put off that everyone always asked where she was from and never seemed bothered that they had no idea what she was talking about when she told them. Americans were ignorant not only of geography but of history, too. And most troubling to her was what she thought connected to this disregard of important things, namely the American denial of aging and death. This last irritation would yield a malevolent concretion over the years, a terror-inducing bête noire that saw her to her grace, the thought that growing old here would mean her eventual sequestering and expiration in a ‘home’ that was nothing like one.

The paragraph above touches on many topics — his mother, Christmas, the eternal question asked of immigrants, aging and death — and its complexity reflects the rather complicated author behind it. The book is dense, no way around it. At the same time, it is astonishingly readable.

Akhtar describes this book as a ‘novel’. None of it read like fiction to me, but perhaps some of the family history was fictionalized for the purpose. Impossible to say.

Like I said, I can’t do justice to this book. Read it.