American Taliban: Believable until the end

WORTH READING

I started this book because Pearl Abraham was my teacher/mentor in the MFA program at Western New England University and I wanted to read one of her novels -- and my wife had read all of them and recommended this one most. 

The novel was excellent, recounting the tale of a relatively ordinary though extremely privileged family with a bright, surfer son, a controlling get-shit-done mother, and a fade-into-the-background father spending a season together on the Outer Banks as their son takes a gap year between high school and the Ivy League school that has allowed him to defer. We see the son interact with his three closest friends, also surfers, all women, one of whom is his girlfriend, and then a skateboarding accident lands the young man in bed for a couple of months, which leads him to spend a lot of time online and reading. He develops an interest in a lovely young woman who is Muslim and also has an interest in Islam from a world religion class he took; he convinces his parents to let him go study Arabic in Brooklyn. He spends a summer studying Arabic, slow-dating the girl, making friends with the other Muslim kids taking classes with him, and from there convinces his parents to fund him taking a trip to Pakistan to study in a college there. All of these events cascade naturally, one from the other, and make perfect sense.

An excellent novel with some parts of the last third striking me as unrealistic.

Do not continue reading if you don't want spoilers. Spoilers after this:

The fact that the young man is then convinced to go train in the hills with guns and people waging a holy war seemed far less reasonable to me; the kid loves his peace-loving mother and often says things that echo what she has taught him to think. I appreciated the way we watch as he becomes progressively more isolated from friends, family and everything from his former life, but still the idea that he would abandon all that to go on a war mission struck me as preposterous.

I was also struck by the homosexual activity that pops up (literally, lol) once he's in Pakistan, leading the young man to wonder if it's just normal for men to have sex with one another there. I wish I knew the answer to this and had more of an explanation for it if it's true. But either way I suppose it's part of the slow isolating and disorienting that is happening to him before he vanishes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where Reason Ends: What would my dead son say to me?

Image
WORTH READING, especially if you, too, have lost a child. I started this spare, heartrending book over again as soon as I finished it. Not because it told a gripping story; it didn’t, which would usually make me lose interest. But it is a deep book whose meaning is murky and I thought a second reading might reveal more to me. As it turns out, the book has taken on an impossible task, trying to illuminate the mystery of how we communicate with the dead, and because it can’t really do that, it left me dissatisfied.  I started it over hoping I would get it’s profound message more clearly the second time. But ultimately, I think that searching is the book’s lesson: once it’s the dead with whom we are communicating, we are always going to be dissatisfied.  Li’s 16 yo son died by suicide and this book, called a novel but really a sort-of memoir, is about a mother talking to her dead 16 yo in “the after time.” Her son is biting, pragmatic, and sarcastic; she doesn’t put comforting words in hi
Read more

The Vanishing Half: Twins who choose different paths learn the same lesson

Image
 WORTH READING for sure. This was a good, multi-generational story with somewhat flat characters that explores the role colorism plays inside the larger issue of racism.  Twin sisters raised in a Southern town of light-skinned blacks (and such towns really existed, apparently) run away at 16 and wind up going two very separate ways. One twin marries a very dark Black man and has a blue-black child of whom she knows her mother will not approve. And the other pretends to be white to get a job and then just decides to stay that way, marrying the boss and never seeing her family again. While it may seem that the first twin has the harder life, as her husband turns out to be abusive and she must return to her colorist town with her extra black child, it is the "passing" twin for whom we feel the most sorry, as she betrays her family and her values to keep her secret. The passing twin acts racist and won't let her own children play with black kids for fear of what the neighbors
Read more

Sister Dear: No more drama in my life

Image
DON'T BOTHER Oh my god, the melodrama! The main character just endlessly whinges and laments her own self-hatred, plays her mother's cruel voice over and over in her head, goes on sickening binges of emotional overeating and purging; and then flagellates herself. It all seems so obvious and tediously overblown. Plus the villains in the story -- her mother, her sister, her biological father -- are all such cardboard cut-outs of shallowness and direct cruelty. I keep giving up and going on to other books, so I may never finish this one...
Read more