Homeland Elegies

“My tale is entirely American,” Ayad Akhtar writes near the beginning of his novel, Homeland Elegies. That sentence stuck with me as I read his novel — his story is a story of America; of immigrants; of Muslims; of a what it means to live in a place that hates you for existing.

Quick note: It’s not really a novel — more autobiographical, as all main facts are drawn from his own life — but still, a novel. (As Akhtar explains, “Yes, it’s a novel. But with a narrator who has my name and many of the biographical facts of my life. Or almost. So much is real, but even that which is, has been deformed just enough to be more useful to the story, to the portrait of our country. I needed a form that could convey or embody, the collapse of fact into fiction, could express the confusion between what is true and what is a good story that has overtaken our lives.” )

Akhtar is perhaps best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Disgraced, about a Pakistani American lawyer who admits at a dinner party one night that he felt, for a moment, proud during the 9/11 attacks. And while that kernel of conflicting identities present in DIsgraced — Pakistani, Muslim, immigrant, American — exists in Homeland Elegies, the novel is so much more expansive than that charged statement.

Through Akhtar’s life, and his parents, we get a tale of American Muslims in a post-9/11 world. We understand his father’s embrace of the American Dream — and of Donald Trump, his one-time patient — and how he grew disillusioned with the country he called his home. At the end, he returns to Pakistan, admitting to his son that “he’d always wanted to think of himself as American, the truth was he’d only ever aspired to the condition.” (In reality, Akhtar’s father died shortly before he finished the novel, and this return to Pakistan — something he had often discussed — was giving him “the ending that he never got.”)

We see Akhtar’s changing feelings towards America, and Americanness, and how he navigates being a Muslim man in a white supremacist America. Many reviews have called the book “essential reading” for an election year — but I’ll go further than that. It’s essential reading to understand the America we live in today, one that we would still be living in even if Donald Trump wasn’t our president.

Rating: ★★★★★