Ayad Akhtar's"Homeland Elegies" Is an Immigrant Saga Unlike Any Other
Ayad Akhtar, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and the author of the acclaimed 2012 novel American Dervish, has written an immigrant saga unlike any other. Discarding the traditional fresh-off-the-boat three acts (we left, we suffered, I returned to my native country and tried to learn the language), Akhtar folds time and space to produce a mesmerizing portrait of a Muslim Pakistani family coming into its own in Wisconsin during the hard years between the Iran hostage crisis and the Trump presidency. Of course, 9/11 casts a long shadow, that terrible day that “foreclosed our futures in this country for at least another generation.”
Homeland Elegies is singular in its richness, inventiveness, and braininess and the fiery candor with which Akhtar chars nearly every sentence. It speaks to his gifts that a novel so ruminative and digressive is also bursting with page-turning head-blowers. There’s the Pakistani cardiologist father, a man who improbably becomes Donald Trump’s heart specialist and subsequently falls under his spell: transforming into an actual Trump apprentice, getting his suits made at Trump’s preferred tailor, even running after the same woman Trump chased. Then there’s the mother who never cottons to the U.S. and whose first love abandons his American life to go back to Pakistan to support the Afghan war against the Soviets—only to find himself years later on the wrong end of a CIA bullet for his backing of Osama bin Laden.
And finally, we have Akhtar’s alter ego—also named Akhtar—who, despite his protestations that his is an American story, cannot help himself from returning compulsively to the suture (literal and metaphoric) between his homelands, a line that is never stable, that appears and disappears when one least expects it, a jagged partition known to all immigrant children that haunts them ceaselessly.
At the end of Akhtar’s tale, Trump is president, Muslims are being targeted, and Akhtar’s parents watch their American dream crumble. Meanwhile, the author’s doppelgänger, with his Ivy League education, prestigious award, and millions in stocks, has become the quintessential American winner every immigrant parent hopes for—yet he is unable to save those for whom his success might mean the most. The novel builds a devastating case for the limits of our country even as it describes its nigh-irresistible allure. For me, this is the book of the year.
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