Enchanted Prose

The ghosts of racism (Mississippi’s Gulf Coast and Delta regions, past and present colliding): Jesmyn Ward’s brilliant Sing, Unburied, Sing woke me up nights. Of all the books I’ve blogged about, this is the one most affecting.

Creative writing professor at Tulane University Jesmyn Ward – who just won a Macarthur Genius Award and is a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award having already received it in 2011 for Salvage the Bones – has created a work of art that’s an activist’s plea for racial justice, equality, dignity. She speaks for all the oppressed, marginalized people who’ve been victims of bigotry, violence, racial profiling, economic injustices and other forms of discrimination and prejudice not only in America’s Deep South – where all the author’s books are set, specifically in Mississippi her home – but for swaths of our country where people are also suffering and stereotyped.

“The rotten underpinnings of the South anchor the whole damn country, like the swampy bottom of the Mississippi River delta. And now we are all sinking in it,” she wrote in a 2016 piece, This Was the Year America Finally Saw the South.

Clearly, this is not a light-hearted novel. The songs that it sings are painful ones, sorrowful like the Sorrow Songs sung by slaves on plantations and at Parchman Farm – Mississippi’s notorious State prison with its legendary brutality said to be worse than slavery – wrenchingly portrayed in the novel. An immoral past that lurks and crashes into a troubled, troubling present, embodying the racist soul of the novel. Lest we forget, Mississippi Blues music originated from the Delta.

The author writes like a poet. Not just rhythmically but in words that pack a lot of meaning into a few. At 285 pages, the novel feels longer as we stop to contemplate the implications of veiled words or a phrase, subtexts and emotions. Illustrative is the lyrical title and the word unburied, which took me almost to the end (page 233, to be precise) to fully grasp its full import, making the novel an ideal choice for book clubs. Moreover, it could trigger honest, deep-set feelings for this fiction is as real and as forceful as it gets. Hot like Mississippi’s heat.

My night wakefulness brings to mind what Pat Conroy revealed how he felt about slavery when he read Toni Morrison’s Beloved: he got “nightmares”. In fact, some are calling Jesmyn Ward the Nobel Prize winner’s contemporary.

Opening with a chapter on the graphical slaughtering of goats, the author forewarns that her story of a poor black family living in bayou country is going to be harsh, that her story will be Black or White, not gray. Yet what bubbles underneath the surface is nuanced, boiling with anger, grief, despair, disillusionment, confusion, waiting to erupt like Yellowstone’s geyser. The surfacing happens most of the time in cringing and subtler ways as everyone in this family is hurting, building to several out-of-control explosions. The most central, setting off the most reactions, is brought about by a car trip from Mississippi’s south to the north, to that torturous prison in the Delta.

Some describe the novel as a “road trip.” It is in the sense that its intent is to carry home the white father of the two children in the family, incarcerated for three years. But this is not a trip that frees. And it’s not the kind of high-spirited trips you might immediately think of like Thelma and Louise or Jack Kerouac’s rollicking classic, On The Road. No, this is a bedeviled trip from start to finish, where the spirits are dark and ghostly.

Speaking of ghosts … Two of the characters who inhabit the novel powerfully and importantly are ghosts: Given and Ritchie. Ritchie’s spirit is the more prevalent and invasive, his yearning voice even taking over a chapter. An unsettling presence when the family begins its trek home from Parchman, but the truth is he’s been weighing down the patriarch in the family, Pop, for a very long time. Back then they called him Riv, when he was an innocent imprisoned at the wretched slave-farm, where Pop met Richie on the cotton chain gang. Ritchie was just a boy, thirteen, the same age as our male narrator, Jojo (Pop’s grandson). The second apparition – Given – appears whenever Pop’s daughter, Leonie (Jojo’s mother) – our female narrator – is high on drugs. Ritchie and Given were both murdered young, murdered because of the color of their skin.

You may not favor the magical realism style of writing, but Ward works it like magic. She invents supernatural beings to vividly express how the history of racism keeps repeating and haunting. She imbues two characters – the alternating narrators, a boy and the mother he can only bear calling Leonie – with super-powers. They can see the ghosts of the racial past so we can.

To borrow from Laura McBride’s short-cut to introducing the main characters in her novel, ‘Round Midnight, here’s a snapshot of this sorry family:

• Jojo is the one who breaks our hearts.
• Leonie is the one who can’t mother.
• Kayla is the “golden one,” the one most “starved for love.”
• Pop is the tough one whose soul can’t rest.
• Mam is the sweet one dying of cancer.
• Michael is the white one, the outsider.

To fill in the blanks some more: Jojo is the profound heartbreaker because he’s just a kid expected to be both a man and a mother. His acceptance, sensitivity, caregiving, and abundant love for his three-year-old sister Kayla also uplifts us the most. He sleeps on a pallet on the floor with Kayla to soothe her. Their drug-addicted, physically and emotionally abusive mother is never around, physically or emotionally, unhealthily grieving the violent loss of her protective younger brother, Given. Pregnant at 17 by Michael, she’s the character most complicated, begging us to try to understand her rather than like her. Even that’s not easy as she’s so out-of-it she doesn’t notice her children and when she does, she “can’t.” Can’t isn’t poetic but there’s so much baggage and distress loading down all her can’ts. Most evident is her Mama (Jojo’s Mam) is dying. A herbal healer, she can’t heal herself.

Jojo and Pop are the carers in this novel (Mam used to be but now she’s bedridden). Grandparents gave Jojo a place to call Home. Home is more than a physical place, it’s the place where we’re cared for. Ward wants us to know this even before we begin the novel, through a lovely dedication to her mother: “who loved me before I took my first breath. Every second of my life, she shows me so.” The concept of Home looms large. Baby Kayla’s clinging, hugging, nuzzling, longing to be “smushed” fills the pages, meant to not only consume her and Jojo but us. Unconditional love and belonging are strong tools that might help weaken some of Leonie’s can’ts.

Jojo and Pop’s nurturing are the lightness, as is the beauty of the saltwatery, marshy landscape and Mam’s growing garden. We’re searching for Hope yet keep bumping up against the stark contrast between the richness of the fertile soil to nourish versus the deprivation of the “black-soiled heart of the State” personified by Parchman.

Mississippi is our hungriest State, the second poorest. Sing, Unburied, Sing sings those Mississippi Blues. Music we should all be listening to right now.

Lorraine

Celebrating a Southern literary giant: We miss you, Pat Conroy. That’s a great big WE like your great big heart and your “big-beaming” smile, and the big shock and loss we all felt when you passed away in 2015 at 70. We’ve been honoring your greatness ever since. Through the establishment of the Pat Conroy Literary Center. Through an annual literary festival in your beloved coastal town, Beaufort, South Carolina. With this little gem of your writings, packed with your bigness.

Meant to be a “keepsake” with an attached red ribbon bookmark, A Lowcountry Heart celebrates Pat Conroy’s literary prowess, convictions, and generous heart. It’s a loving and thoughtfully selected compilation of “letters” – blog posts the long-handed, “language-obsessed” author called them, not liking the word blog at all nor wanting to give up the feel of his craft despite “writer’s cramp,” relented in 2009 when his health was declining limiting his travel. It also includes his speeches and other writings, a collaboration between his long-time (thirty years) editor/publisher Nan A. Talese and Conroy’s writer wife, Cassandra King, both of whom contributed personal reflections adding to his.

It’s a perfect selection to read as the second Pat Conroy Literary Festival kicks off soon, running from October 19 – 22, 2017. Inspiration for this “letter.”

We miss Pat Conroy even if we never met him at one of his legendary book signings, for we’ve likely read one of more of his books. A prolific writer of Southern fiction and memoir, he “often intermingled the two.” You probably figured that out already if you’ve read The Great Santini influenced by his “tyrant” of a father, a Marine Corps fighter pilot who moved the Conroy clan (Pat Conroy was one of seven children) all around the South, the settings for his works. Or, read The Lords of Discipline based on the “four-grueling years” he spent at The Citadel, the military college in Charleston. You may not know, though, that a girl who caught his eye in kindergarten is a character in The Prince of Tides; that the gay piano player in South of Broad was inspired by an “irreplaceable friend” whom Conroy cared so much about he moved to San Francisco for a while since his friend’s southern family disowned him; that The Water is Wide is based on his gloriously happy year teaching poor black kids on tiny Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, a book some call a novel, others a memoir; that a girl he swooned over in 8^th grade appears in Beach Music; or that The Losing Season is about the year his basketball team lost the Southern Conference. The way he went about contacting and uniting his old teammates is one for the books. I myself just found a gorgeous copy of his last published memoir, The Death of Santini, said to put closure on his relationship with his tyrannical father.

There’s a powerful theme here that has everything to do with never forgetting the people who “changed my whole life and the way I saw the whole world,” for good and for bad. Bless his mother who taught her son Pat about “evil” because in this splendid insight into this writer’s world we feel his deep moral compassion and outrage against wrongs. He called it out the way he saw it. “How the world presented itself.” What words of wisdom and eloquence would Pat Conroy be saying about how the world is presenting itself today? Eerily, a world not many years since his searing voice left us, but it sure feels that way.

Which is why we can’t help but be struck by how self-effacing Pat Conroy was, always striving to be “good enough,” to be ”bold enough.” Writing that “generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers,” it seems just from these memorable samplings and anecdotes, Pat Conroy may have been the most generous of them all.

“Reading became the most essential thing about me,” says the avid collector of 8,000 books. So you’ll find heartfelt tributes to so many writers living and gone. He dubs Anne Rivers Siddons “Queen of Southern fiction.” Says Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto “knocked my socks off.” Speaks of Barbara Kingsolver’s work as “eye-popping.” He’s so very proud, as in “shouting it out to the hills” of his wife’s writings; Moonrise a “fabulous novel.” He calls Phillip Roth a “gift to American letters.” Of Ron Rash’s Serena, Conroy glowingly says: “it made me think of the North Carolina mountains like Thomas Wolfe never did.” Then there are the stages he went through when he was “Faulknered” and “Steinbecked” and “Virginia Woolfed” and “Hemingwayed” and “Fitzgeralded.” The list and accolades go on and on.

Pat Conroy was an equal opportunity praiser. Encouraged by a good friend (he maintained so many friendships, some going back forty years) at 68 to give science fiction a try, a genre he’d stayed clear of all his life, prior to meeting George R. R. Martin on a book tour that stopped in Santa Fe. What joy he expresses discovering this imaginative “genius” of a fantasy writer, reading everything Martin wrote beginning with A Game of Thrones. He admires Gay Talese, Nan A. Talese’s husband, a writer of “impeccable prose.” Pat Conroy movingly thanks friends and their spouses alike, writerly and otherwise.

That may be the key to the greatness of his literary style. So much raw emotion soars in his prose. A terrific example of his wordsmithing and enormous gratitude for literature and those who teach it is seen in a passage from a 2007 letter he sent to the Charleston Gazette:

“The world of literature has everything in it, and refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in Saint Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany.”

Pat Conroy’s appreciation for his readership is just as strong. This great writer found “one of the greatest things about being a writer” was engaging with his legion of readers. So much so he encouraged them to bring as many of his books to his signings, which notoriously ran on for hours, contrary to the way these events typically go. For he was a contrarian who mischievously admits he’s “obnoxiously friendly,” so he never ran out of steam for his devoted fans. That makes us feel good, particularly when we’ve read other acclaimed authors complaining about the drudgery of big city tours. Since we can no longer tell Pat Conroy what his books mean to us, A Lowcountry Heart tells us what we meant to him.

Pat Conroy speaks of the beauty of Beaufort, South Carolina as a “cult.” That may be true as Southern Living named Beaufort the best small southern town in 2017. But the voters who make up these nominations tend to change their opinions annually, whereas Pat Conroy’s cult will endure year after year.

Lorraine

Fantastical Nature as Fantastic Therapy (Orkney Islands, Scotland and London, recently): Judge this life-affirming book by its eye-catching cover. Where in the world is the smoothed-over-centuries rocky coast? Hint: somewhere “between the North Sea and the Atlantic.” Who is the tall, slender, modelesque young woman meditating? Hint: she’s an “edge-lander,” someone who grew up near the edge of the world.

Amy Liptrot not only lived on that edge geographically – the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland – but also behaviorally, “always seeking sensation and raging against those who warned me away from the edge.” That edge shaped and defined the author and her award-winning memoir, remarkably soothing for a “wild girl” recovering from alcohol addiction on wild islands. Yet not so surprising for a girl who spent her childhood “living among the elements.” A childhood of “dramatic scenes,” earthy and personal.

Born during one of her father’s bipolar disorder breakdowns, he endured a mind-boggling fifty-six electroshock treatments. Through it all (her parents divorced), Liptrot felt “always loved.”

The heart of the memoir takes place on the Orkneys two years after the author made it through an intensive rehab program in London, where she hit rock bottom. (Her brother, who attended the same university as she did, tried to help until she needed aggressive intervention.) Today, at thirty-five, she’s five years sober.

Some 20,000 people are estimated to be living on the seventy islands that comprise the Orkney archipelago. Many are sparsely populated or completely uninhabited. Most of the memoir’s Orkney sections are set on the so-called Mainland where the author’s family farm is located, and on one of the northernmost islands, Papay, population seventy. Liptrot chose to spend five winter months on this remote island feeling less alone than she did in London. If you read to experience new worlds, The Outrun will definitely take you to one.

Much of the exotic language – references to the far northern reaches of an ancient landscape, culture, history, and folklore – is otherworldly. A world in which you don’t just see shooting stars in the night skies, you see galaxies, planets (four, unbelievably, on one night), moonbows (rainbows caused by the moon’s light), and the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) or what this poetess of Nature calls Merry Dancers.

Not everything is merry, of course. Liptrot didn’t become sober until thirty (she started drinking at fifteen), when she returned home trading “disco lights for celestial lights.” A steady, uphill process that replaced her dependence on alcohol to feel “more alive” to getting high on her unique “natural surroundings,” birdlife, and sea life. She found she could get “high on fresh air and freedom on the hill” and “that being sober could be kind of a trip and I was just riding it out like a soldier.” A magical, mystery ride.

Our first indication that The Outrun is going to be out-of-the-ordinary is that it opens with a helpful glossary of Orcadian words. Some are farming terms like byre for barn and kye for cattle since Liptrot grew up on a croft farm. More than an unfamiliar word, crofting is a landowning culture that dates back to the late nineteenth century when a farmer rented a small piece of land along with a croft house. (Liptrot’s childhood farmhouse is that old.) These houses seem to have personalities, with names. In fact, croft houses tended to outlive their temporary landowners, so people are more likely to be identified by the names of their croft homes rather than their own.

“I grew up in the sky, with an immense sense of space,” Liptrot tells us, but she felt “limited by the confines of the island and the farm.” That edge-of-the-world farm included uncultivated land called the outrun, described as land “where domestic and wild animals co-exist and humans don’t often visit.” Liptrot spent the first eighteen years of her life walking on the windswept coastal cliffs of this outrun, neighboring one of the most intact New Stone Age archaeological settlements (Skara Brae) anywhere, a World Heritage Site.

For all its wonder, the Orkney’s are “desolate-seeming.” Liptrot herself was lonely and sad for a very long time, trying to fill a “void” she couldn’t seem to fill, “bottomless pain.” So how could we not rejoice in her eloquent revelations of “filling the void with new knowledge and beauty” upon finding herself as she rediscovers her homeland?

Still a thrill seeker, she swims in the frigid, pounding North Seas with a polar bear club, an unimaginable “cold-water high.” Thanks to technology and the author’s intensely curious mind and “perpetual hope,” she carved out fascinating activities and interests. Became a passionate bird watcher, stargazer, rare cloud studier, astronomy buff, weather-watcher, and tracker of marine traffic, flight radar, tidal charts, sunrise calendars. “In the islands in the age of digital media, we often find that, although it seems contradictory, technology brings us closer to the wild.”

If you’re a birder, conservationist, environmentalist, tuned into the endangerment of species, this memoir is for you. There’s hundreds of bird species on these islands, along with an active, long-standing RSPB – the Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds. Like Artic terns, fulmars, puffins, shags, black-backed gulls, gannets, whaups (also called curlews), tysties (or black guillemots), kittiwakes, razorbills, turnstones, golden plovers, snipe. There’s even an Orkney phrase for hunting seabirds: swappin’ for auks. For a while, the author raced to count endangered corncrake birds for the group on Papay. Liptrot compares herself to the corncrakes “clinging to existence,” saying she’s “clinging to a normal life.”

Nature and wildlife are gifts wherever we live on earth. On the Orkneys these gifts are extraordinary and abundant. But it’s Liptrot’s courage, perseverance, amazement, and phenomenal zest for immersing herself in these gifts that enabled her fulfillment and healing, one day at a time. Inspiration we can all cling to.

Lorraine

(I’ve fallen in love with memoirs. Tweaked the byline to reflect.)

An intimate, enlightening memoir on the meaning of life stirred by seven-and-a-half years studying and embracing the Talmud (Jerusalem, present-day): Ilana Kurshan has written a remarkable, soul-searching memoir.

Scholarly yet wonderfully accessible, spiritual yet infused with the “simple pleasures” of everyday life. For someone who is an extremely private person, it’s remarkably self-exposing. A bold, beautiful leap, though Kurshan says it’s “less an act of courage than a leap of faith.” Her faith, Judaism, is profound. As is her eloquent memoir.

If All the Seas Were Ink is rooted in the wisdom of an ancient, sacred text set down and revisited by rabbis at least fifteen centuries ago. Considered one of the most questioning bodies of literature in the world, the Talmud, also referred to as the Torah, is “a text for those who are living the questions rather than for those who found the answers.” Kurshan purposefully and cogently probes these questions seeking deeper understanding of the beauty and hardships of life. Fervent, “obsessed,” about the power of literature and poetry as a driving life force, she rises above her self-doubts to practice what she wholeheartedly believes: that it’s her divine obligation to impart what she’s learned, in striving to be the best person she can be.

If you’re wondering how the teachings of very-old rabbis, studiers of the Torah – the basis for all Jewish life – have any relevance to your life today, whether you’re Jewish or not, I encourage you to read If All the Seas Were Ink. I can’t imagine there isn’t something going on in your life that’s not questioned, touched upon, here. “The Talmud surprised me at nearly every turn,” the author says, who surprises us by making writings you might otherwise find “dry” so relatable and relevant, thus compelling. “The text will illuminate your soul, and your soul in turn will illuminate the text.”

Studying the Talmud – the Babylonian Talmud, not the Jerusalem Talmud, for it’s the most examined and determinative – takes an incredible commitment of time, discipline, and reflection. You don’t have to be as learned as Kurshan, a literary agent, translator and editor of Hebrew and English works who literally walks around with a book in her hand to the point of breaking bones; or raised in a rabbinical home situated on the property of a synagogue; or as dedicated to your faith (“an anchor, if not a life raft”). But you do have to be strongly motivated and inquiring for the long-haul as Torah study is a seven-and-a-half year journey called daf yomi, which means daily page in Hebrew. Those pages total 2,711 double-sided, organized in thirty-seven volumes called tractates, covering five hundred years of Jewish legal, religious, philosophical, ethical judgments, beliefs, and traditions.

Daily study suited the author’s intellectual and industrious disposition exceedingly well. “I cannot help but engage the text because the text engages me.” Still, it took her a year to commit even when her life was aching for direction and comfort. That she found “the most meaningful way to study Torah is by searching for the interconnections and resonances between Torah and the rest of one’s reading, learning, and living” fits all she reveals to us about herself and where she was during a painful period in her life.

“Learning Torah, like falling in love, is supposed to set us on fire.” It sure did for Kurshan. We are the beneficiaries of that elation, fueled by her needs, zeal, and view that “only religion can inspire us to connect with other people in meaningful ways so the universe does not seem so vast and lonely.”

The year before Kurshan undertook Torah study she was 27, depressed and lost, alone and abandoned in a foreign land after moving to Israel from New York for a marriage that lasted only a year. She speaks candidly and movingly about her feelings of loneliness, sadness, failure, and shame, harkening back to an earlier time when she suffered from anorexia. The characteristics of young women afflicted with this disease match up with her frank admissions of “compulsiveness” and “self-denial,” making her story even more uplifting because when she completed the first cycle of her studies she was joyfully remarried and the mother of a toddler and twin baby girls. Today, the author is the mother of four, counting her blessings.

Ilana Kurshan is a resourceful, multi-tasker who aims to make every minute count. (She laminates poems to pull out and memorize when she swims in the pool her literary office overlooks!)  But she didn’t come up with this creative approach to studying the Torah, though it would be plausible if she did.

Invented in 1923 by Rabbi Meir Shapiro “as a way of unifying the Jewish world,” the process means that on any given day in the multi-year program of study Jews (and non-Jews) from around the world are open to the exact same page. Imagine having an interest in common to unite us with strangers? A concept the author expresses as a “worldwide web of conversational threads.” One tiny slice of how she brings the spiritual world right into our contemporary one.

Kurshan wraps herself up in the teachings of the Torah to guide the choices she makes and how she lives. Dedicated to running too, she chants prayers amidst the old, hilly streets of Jerusalem. Her literary passion is ingrained in her spirit and soul, more than anyone I know. So besides lighting up rabbinic literature, If All the Seas Were Ink is suffused with an eclectic assortment of references to classical and modern writers and romantic poets – Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Emily Dickenson, Edna Dt. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare, Nancy Milford, Margaret Drabble, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and more.  It’s a treat to see how she blends sacred and secular words and thoughts.

Ilana Kurshan’s staunch feminism is another treat. She grew up in a conservative synagogue – men and women sat and prayed together – versus her ultra-orthodox husband’s tradition of separating the genders. She explains that it’s only been in recent decades that women are tackling the Talmud, also male-dominated in attitudes and customs, owing in part to daily podcasts and online free resources translated in English. (This translator translates all Hebrew for us; she wants us to understand.)

“Learning daf yomi is like zooming through a safari on a motorbike; there is so much to take in, but you are moving at an impossibly rapid clip” so the author kept a journal and wrote poems that would jog her memory. “These journal entries unfolded as a record not just of my learning but also of my life.”

That life, now 37, is full yet still questing. The memoirist asks “how much can we reasonably be expected to change ourselves?” in response to the Talmud’s questioning what we can and cannot change. Kurshan provides us with an answer to this one: quite a bit. As long as we’re willing to take risks, push ourselves with grit and determination, and take stock of, be grateful for, what we have. I, for one, feel grateful for her insightful memoir and think you will too.

Lorraine

The radicalization of an American-Iranian teenager living along the Southern California coast (2011 to 2014): A Good Country is like no other novel I’ve blogged about. Maybe like no other novel you’ve read.

It couldn’t be more timely and forceful in its quest for answers to compelling questions. How does a fun-seeking, peace-loving, advantaged American-Iranian teenager, Rez Courdee, living in a place some would call God’s country, become radicalized?

If you’re looking for a single, definitive moment to pinpoint when and why that happens you won’t find it here. It’s unrealistic, complex issues not easy to define. What you will find are themes, circumstances, and a series of events – everyday and catastrophic – that culminate in the fate Rez chooses. The novel’s strength resides in its authenticity, its frank depiction of a privileged teenager’s life in long, flowing prose that manages to be brutally honest and poetically tender at the same time.

Rez’s transformation is at odds with our perceptions of a kid who has a lot going for him, thus his changes-of-heart are even more confounding and provocative. An academic star, a chess player. That spells nerdy and isolating in a teen’s world, worsened by Rez feeling alienated at home. So, if you’ve been hanging out with three rich, pushing-the-limits friends since eighth grade and you’re an only child longing for a brother, yearning “to be inside the circle,” acceptance by your peers is all the more seductive.

When the novel opens we begin to see Rez’s persona vacillating. He’s a rising junior at a tony prep school in Laguna Beach, an exclusive enclave of spectacular homes hugging the southern California coast with its breathtaking views and legendary surfing culture. This is not the SoCal surfing culture made famous by the Beach Boys in the sixties. This music is “anger and confusion.”

Just as the lyrics resonate with these kids, the prose grabs us. It sings along naturally, uninterrupted by removing all quotation marks. An interesting technique as dialogue is plentiful and not watered down, so we’re constantly hit with angst and “aimless rage.” Rez, of course, caves in to his friends’ taunts, soon also getting high on drugs and sex and yes, surfing. Which we wish will be the buffer, the savior for the path Rez seems headed for. Sadly, it’s not.

Rez’s journey starts off when he’s still a good and dutiful son to his horribly strict father, Sal, a physically violent and emotionally abusive “tyrant without a cause.” His mother has no power in this family, painfully docile, quietly cooking the “oldest food in the world.” She’s not even allowed to have her friends over to their house, so her presence for Rez and us is minimal. Its Rez’s father, whom he’s rightfully scared of, he needs to escape from. Plus, he’s terribly lonesome and bored at home, more reasons to escape. Which he does, with “diversions.”

The novel is divided into three parts. In Part I, Rez seeks the companionship of the small band of “brothers” mentioned above, nicknamed the Apostles because their names come from the Bible – Peter, James, John. When he realizes they aren’t brotherly, we find him in Part II befriending a different group. Arash and Fatima, childhood friends, have families in Syria. They become dedicated to the teachings of Islam. At first, Rez dismisses their piety, their praying at mosques. But as their faithfulness deepens, he wants to understand the peace and brotherhood they worship. A developmental process, once again influenced by his peers, maturing in Part III.

Rez is continually searching for his identity, asking how many “selves” does a person have?  How to be whole? “How to become a man?”

Laleh Khadevi was a human rights documentarian before she became an award-winning novelist. Iranian-American, she teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco. So while A Good Country is fictional, her daring filmography turns into daring prose. Her lens now shines a glaring light on, and coincides with, the rise in terrorism and anti-Muslim sentiments after 9/11. In fact, the novel tracks seasons, opening in the fall of 2011.

A recent article on social class in America by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout offers some food for thought on the theme of powerlessness. She quotes a friend who teaches about the working-class, who told her: “it may be more helpful to think about class not in terms of education level or income level, but in terms of the sense of power that people feel over their lives.”

Feeling appreciated/in-control of your life versus vilified/marginalized may help account for why Rez (Arash and Fatima) are feeling increasingly culturally estranged as resentment towards Muslims heats up. As it does, this intense novel intensifies. Rez falls madly in love with beautiful Fatima, along with an “end-of-the-world tone” propelling him.

One visible way it manifests is surfing. There’s a shift in Rez’s elation with the “fantastic wind” and the “cool water on his skin” to something more profound and troubling. Palpably, his desperation is sharpening. “In the water everything was good again” but when Rez comes up for air he’s still faced with the fallout after the Boston Marathon, San Bernardino, and the Costa Mesa shopping mall attacks.

The most cringe-worthy anti-Muslim sentiments occur at an airport scene when Rez is returning home from Indonesia. An extravagant graduation gift from his father who is now meeker, shamed by his acts of betrayal towards his son and shamed by a demotion at Merck Labs where he’d been Head Scientist.

Pulled aside by security – racial profiling right before our literary eyes – a guard admits to Rez: “we saw your name, your travel destination, your smart-ass attitude, and thought we’d tell you what is at stake.” He goes on to say:

“… your people, who think they are worth a great deal, know that even after making all that money, they are worthless. Their children are worthless, and if this violence continues, their children’s children will be worthless too. The American dream will never play all the way out for you. Do you understand?”

Rather than get outraged, Rez believes “the man was not wrong.” To stay calm, he thinks about the mosque he just visited, welcomed by the iman and brothers. Brotherhood – there it is – the attraction though not necessarily the turning point moment.

Khadivi is never judgmental. She lets the facts speak for themselves. Let’s us form our own opinions, like a gifted documentarian does.

A gifted writer too. For I didn’t even know A Good Country was the last installment in her Kurdish trilogy, spanning three generations of Rez’s family: his Iranian grandfather debuted in The Age of Orphans; his Iranian-American father in The Walking. Obviously, the novel stands well alone, although you can’t help but want to backtrack to gain further insight into Rez’s father’s upbringing to contemplate the impact of those cultural threads.

Isn’t it ironic, heartbreaking and heart-lifting, that the largest population of Muslims in this country – in Texas, a quarter of a million in Houston alone – risked their lives and opened up their mosques to save Americans during Hurricane Harvey?

When will our good country save itself? Become good and whole again?

Lorraine