After receiving widespread acclaim for the autobiographical Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes, Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera delivers a dreamy yet compelling exploration of female friendship and coming of age in her fiction debut.
In Cross-Stitch, Mila finds her world shattered when she gets word that a childhood friend, Citlali, has drowned in the sea in Senegal. Few details are available about this shocking news, leading Mila to wonder if the death was an accident or suicide. As she organizes Citlali’s memorial service, Mila begins to sift through memories of Citlali and their mutual friend Dalia, whom she hasn’t seen for years. Sewing has long been central to Mila’s life—in fact, she’s just published a book about embroidery—and the three girls often sewed together. Now Mila muses, “I haven’t worked out how to sew and think about Citlali without pricking my fingers.”
Mila and Citlali had a middle school teacher who pointed out “that the words ‘text’ and ‘textile’ had the same root: the Latin texere, to weave, braid, or compose.” Throughout Cross-Stitch, Barrera weaves, braids and composes the story of the trio’s friendship into a plot so convincing and emotionally intelligent that readers may mistake it for a memoir, while seamlessly incorporating intriguing tidbits about the history of embroidery. The notes cover topics ranging from embroidery in ancient Egypt to a recent global campaign using crochet to raise awareness of the destruction of coral reefs due to climate change. Barrera’s prose is insightful and precise, and MacSweeney’s translation conveys a natural, conversational rhythm.
Barrera aptly writes: “While techniques for healing wounds have evolved over the centuries, a needle and thread are still commonly used. Something in the tissues, in the weaves . . . may offer answers to how other wounds can be healed.” As Mila desperately tries to make sense of both their shared history and Citlali’s loss, Cross-Stitch draws readers into the many strands uniting Mila, Dalia and Citlali.
Jazmina Barrera weaves, braids and composes this story of a trio of friends into a plot so convincing and emotionally intelligent that readers may mistake it for a memoir.
To read Jesmyn Ward is to be carried by her epic, transformative language to the dark heart of the American South and, once there, to be surprised by the stark beauty of the region’s people. Let Us Descend, the Mississippi author’s fourth novel, brings Ward’s intimate knowledge of place to the pre-Civil War South, where her captivating narrator, teenage girl Annis, is enslaved. A two-time National Book Award winner (2011’s Salvage the Bones and 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing), Ward writes in the traditions of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison—but this story is unmistakably her own.
The journey begins at a North Carolina rice plantation owned by the enslaver who fathered Annis through rape. In a shady clearing in the woods, Annis’ mother teaches her to fight, yet their relationship is one of intense tenderness. When the enslaver sells Annis’ mother, our heroine is left grief-wracked. Before long, she too is sold downriver on a harrowing march to the slave markets of New Orleans. In North Carolina, she eavesdropped on her white half-sisters’ lessons about Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now, Annis recognizes her own descent through the circles of hell.
Let Us Descend is infused with the supernatural. Spirits approach Annis on her journey, offering protection and oblivion. Astute and intuitive, Annis steels herself against temptation, grounding herself in memories of her mother. The theme of mothering extends to the care Annis offers to and receives from the girls and women around her, which allows the characters to maintain their dignity and assert their humanity. These interactions are a balm not only to Annis but also to the reader. Ward constantly reminds us that oppressed people retain “soft parts” that the evils of slavery can never truly touch.
Though Annis seldom speaks and her dialogue often consists of single, short sentences, her thoughts sing with Ward’s signature lyricism. Ward’s choices of first-person point of view and present tense anchor us in Annis’ imagination. The narrator pictures her mother’s eyes “shriveled to pale raisins”; the ropes that bind her are “abrasive as a cat’s tongue on my open wrists”; a dying man is “a tunneling worm, shifting the earth above him.” These vivid observations and poetic interpretations express her resistance against bondage, her abiding understanding of beauty and her will to survive.
We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Ward’s reimagining of slavery is the profound manifestation of that possibility.
We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Jesmyn Ward’s portrayal of slavery is the profound manifestation of that possibility.
In Naoise Dolan’s addictive, rubbernecking disaster story about love, engaged 20-something Dubliners wrestle with intimacy and commitment as their wedding day approaches.
Oxford-educated Luke’s most striking characteristic is his obvious ambivalence. His fiancée Celine’s most singular trait, apart from being a dedicated, almost single-minded, internationally recognized concert pianist, is her willful denial in the face of Luke’s transgressions. Even Luke marvels that she puts up with him: “You’d think Celine would have seen my early diffidence as a warning. Whatever about the unanswered texts, me literally saying ‘I don’t want a relationship’ is, perhaps, a red flag. But Celine has never met sheet music she couldn’t crack.”
This dynamic is maddening at first. But, like reality television, relational trainwrecks are compelling. The first sign of trouble is that Luke and Celine’s engagement begins, excruciatingly, with what feels like a shrug rather than a decision. Discussing their hypothetical relationship limits, Luke confesses, “if I thought we’d never get married. Or that level of commitment. If I knew that wasn’t going to happen, then . . . .” When Celine attempts to offer reassurance by suggesting that she “probably” wants to be with him forever, as if staring down a dare, Luke asks the question.
Though The Happy Couple will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People, its wry voice and cleverly executed Rashomon-like structure, revisiting pivotal events and foundational cracks in Celine and Luke’s relationship from their perspectives as well as those of their closest friends and family, make it a standout. Bit by bit, in lean, ironic prose that packs powerful insight, Dolan reveals the humanity and vulnerability of all parties involved, including brilliant sections from the perspectives of Luke’s best man and former boyfriend Archie, and Celine’s sister Phoebe.
We don’t see what Luke is thinking for a long time, and he’s easy to hate when he’s merely reflected in other people’s emotional wreckage. When, after 100 pages, he finally comes into focus, his sensitivity and depth of feeling are shocking. The closer we look, the more human these characters become, and the more it hurts to see Celine and Luke stumble away from each other. Dolan’s challenging and well-crafted rewriting of the marriage plot has much to reveal about love and perspective.
Naoise Dolan reveals the humanity and vulnerability of all her characters through a cleverly executed multiperspectival structure that makes The Happy Couple a standout.
In 2020, E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, rocked readers with its excavation of Koh’s astonishing family history rendered in heart-shattering prose. A tribute to her family, to her Korean roots and to language itself, Koh’s memoir was acclaimed for its tender yet fierce writing, as well as its compassionate and candid exploration of generational trauma, forgiveness, reconciliation and resilience. In her debut novel, The Liberators, Koh revisits these themes through the lens of fiction, unfurling a stirring family odyssey against the backdrop of nearly 40 years of Korean history.
Beginning in the 1980s, The Liberators loosely centers on Insuk and Sungho, a young couple who fall in love and marry in Daejeon, South Korea, but soon flee to the United States in pursuit of a fresh start away from the violence and instability of the military dictatorship. However, even in California, echoes of the conflict between North and South Korea continue to reverberate, deepening fractures in their growing family and in their community. Through the perspectives of numerous narrators—from prison guards to revolutionaries, North Korean defectors and the family dog—we witness the family navigating hardships and happiness over the course of decades, inching closer to a future in which the wounds and sorrows that both isolate and unite them can be healed.
Koh has crafted an intriguing novel of contrasts and complements. It is a deeply intimate family story, interlaced with high-level philosophical discussions of Korean history, politics and identity. At times, the story brims with tragedy and risks tumbling readers into a pit of despair, yet a shimmering undercurrent of hope always remains to offer a reprieve. It is violent and tender, wistful and hopeful, built from small moments and yet sweeping.
In such an ambitious book, it is Koh’s writing—a symphony of vivid imagery and emotion—that binds all the disparate elements together into something that will burrow deep into readers’ hearts and minds. A brave exploration of the complexities of the human experience and the impossible task of making peace with the past, The Liberators is another resounding triumph for Koh that is sure to win her new fans, particularly those who prefer introspective novels in which the writing and ideas pack just as much punch as the plot.
The Liberators is another resounding triumph for E.J. Koh: a brave exploration of the complexities of the human experience and the impossible task of making peace with the past.
Most people eventually think about the concept of permanence—how one could live on after inevitable death. Some are drawn to photography for what has been, at least until recently, incontrovertible proof of what once existed. But attempts to secure a permanent place in history are often complicated by changes in technology, the prejudices of others, or, in the case of art, the purloining of treasured works. Conflicts like these animate Teju Cole’s dazzling novel of ideas Tremor, his first novel since 2011’s Open City.
Fans of Cole’s work know he is a photographer as well as a writer. His moving, introspective 2017 book of images, Blind Spot, features photos from his worldwide travels. Cole draws from those experiences in Tremor, in which Tunde, the protagonist who, like Cole, is a Harvard professor raised in Nigeria, perpetually examines the tensions of life as a Black man in a white-dominated country where he is never seen as belonging anywhere.
Tremor is split into eight exploratory chapters in which Cole addresses injustices both personal and global. During a talk Tunde gives at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which forms the fifth chapter of the book, he describes the circumstances under which many of their paintings and plaques came into their possession, from the Nazis’ cultural genocide to Britain’s 18-day massacre in Benin in 1897 that led to the expropriation of 4,000 artworks. He ends with “a plea to take restitution seriously, a plea to reimagine the future of the museum.”
In a brilliant extended sequence in the sixth chapter, Cole includes the first-person perspectives of numerous people Tunde interviews during a trip to Nigeria to depict the complexities and struggles of life in that country. Other sections address colonialism and the reluctance of many in the United States to “change their essential faith in American superiority.” Hanging over these discussions is the specter of impending death. A Harvard colleague is diagnosed with colon cancer, and Tunde fears, even in his 40s, signs of his own inevitable decline.
A lesser writer would have turned this into a depressing jeremiad, but Cole makes it a thrilling and important work. During Tunde’s Nigeria visit, one interviewee says, “We have to know how to forget the past in order to make progress into the future.” As Tunde does in his talk, Tremor issues a plea to reimagine the future for the betterment of humanity.
In this dazzling novel of ideas, Teju Cole addresses injustices both personal and global, and issues a plea to reimagine the future for the betterment of humanity.
Some of the most fascinating novels explore the tensions between traditional ways of life and the lure of more modern ways of being. This is what roils the plot in Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s second novel, A Spell of Good Things. For at least two of its main characters, teenager Ẹniọlá and fledgling doctor Wuraọlá, the tension is all but intolerable.
The story begins in a southwestern state in present-day Nigeria, nearly a year before an election that will usher a corrupt (or even criminal) politician into the governorship. Schools are lousy; students, including Ẹniọlá and his sister, are flogged if their parents don’t pay their school fees. Hospitals are even worse; more than one patient dies in the hospital where Wuraọlá works because of a lack of simple antivirals. There is no safety net, and inequality is atrocious. Ẹniọlá, his mother and sister must beg in the street. The children’s father, fired from his job, is in such a state of despair that he won’t get out of bed. On the other hand, Wuraọlá’s family is well-off enough to pay for her education and throw a lavish party to celebrate her mother’s birthday.
Yet both impoverished Ẹniọlá and financially comfortable Wuraọlá feel hogtied by the traditions of the somewhat matriarchal society in which they were raised. Deference to elders and those in authority is so absolute that Ẹniọlá’s parents don’t even consider going to the school and insisting that the teachers stop beating their kids. Wuraọlá’s profession as a doctor isn’t what warms the cockles of her family’s hearts the most; it’s that she’s getting married before she’s 30.
Ẹniọlá and Wuraọlá are destined to meet, and they do so in the most innocent and pedestrian of ways. But after that first encounter, the events that follow reveal the profound irony of the novel’s title.
Adébáyọ̀ (Stay With Me) has a sprightly writing style that’s pleasurably at odds with the devastating story she tells. She captures the almost musical speech patterns of her characters and doesn’t trouble to translate snatches of Nigeria’s many languages. The novel’s cast is large, but each character is distinct; you won’t confuse Ẹniọlá’s mother with Wuraọlá’s, even though they’re quite alike. Both suffer, and so do their families.
A Spell of Good Things is a wonderfully written, tragic book.
Ayobami Adebayo has a sprightly writing style that’s pleasurably at odds with the devastating story she tells in A Spell of Good Things.
As Jennifer Savran Kelly’s debut novel, Endpapers, opens, main character Dawn Levit has stalled. She’s in her mid-20s, dissatisfied with her art (she designs, prints and binds handmade books) and unable to make anything new. She’s also feeling stuck in her relationship with Lukas, whom Dawn is pretty sure would love her more if she were a man. Dawn has been exploring her own gender and sexual identities since high school, taking tentative steps to find her way, but she’s still doubting her instincts and herself. Lately, she and Lukas have found comfort in “slipping back into the closet,” where neither has to worry about feeling accepted. But neither of them is content, either.
While at work in the book conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dawn finds a torn-off paperback cover bearing the title Turn Her About, which depicts a woman looking into a mirror and seeing a man’s face. On the back is a letter handwritten in German; the correspondents’ names (Gertrude and Marta) and Ich liebe dich (“I love you”) are the only words Dawn can understand. But this letter, apparently from the 1940s or ’50s, sends Dawn on a quest to learn more about the pulp novel, and about Gertrude and Marta.
Following Dawn through the spring of 2003, Endpapers depicts a New York City still shrouded in post-9/11 gloom, evoking an uneasy mood and underlining Dawn’s sense that even in early 21st-century New York, being different isn’t safe. Out at a bar one night, Dawn, Lukas and their friend Jae are harassed by two men, which leads to a hate crime that Dawn feels she incited.
Dawn’s introspection is at times painful; she’s young, self-absorbed and prone to missteps with her friends and co-workers. But as the story progresses, the mystery of Gertrude and Marta converges beautifully with the artwork that Dawn begins to conceive. Kelly is a bookbinder and book production editor, and the novel’s details of book and print restoration ground and add depth to Dawn’s story.
Endpapers is a coming-of-age story about growing as an artist and learning to trust and build relationships in a world that doesn’t want to make room for you. Despite its early 2000s setting, Endpapers still feels timely, leading us to reflect on how far we’ve come in accepting differences and how far we still have to go.
Though set in the early 2000s, Endpapers still feels timely, leading us to reflect on how far we’ve come in accepting differences and how far we still have to go.
Nazlı Koca’s debut novel, The Applicant, is a gut-wrenching story that will make you laugh but also question why and whether you should be laughing at all.
Immigrant and refugee experiences can be surreal and nightmarish, but for those lucky enough to reach their destinations, life can be filled with a sudden Kafkaesque dark humor. Such is the case for Koca’s protagonist, Leyla, a Turkish immigrant in Berlin. After failing out of university, Leyla tries to sue her way back into a student visa, while in the meantime working at an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland-themed hotel.
As Leyla navigates Berlin’s nightlife, trying to find some sort of solace, she meets a right-wing Swedish tourist, and suddenly she has an in: She can stay in Germany if she accepts a traditional, conservative life, although it would mean giving up her career in art. Initially this bargain seems better than returning to Turkey to live with her mother and sister, but eventually Leyla begins to question what she is really searching for.
Written in diary form, The Applicant is bound to draw many comparisons to other works (I found it to be like an inversion of the German film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul), but the most obvious is to Sylvia Plath’s poem by the same name. Both pieces play with the idea of conformity, and while Plath focuses on the commercialization of femininity, Koca takes a more racialized approach. Leyla experiences subtle racism from almost every character, and through these interactions, we witness the convergence of different ideologies of racial supremacy due to immigration, and how, with the presence of her Swedish lover, white supremacy holds punitive power over all of them. Through the diary format, we get an inside look at Leyla’s forced conformity in what is perhaps a response to the surreal, dehumanizing laundry list Plath wrote decades ago.
Despite these similarities, The Applicant is a truly unique book, particularly in its profound global scope. Leyla meets characters from all over the world who have come to Europe seeking a better life. Her romantic ideals of Berlin shatter early on, and she is left jaded and addicted to drugs, falling into the exact stereotype she idealized artistically. This underscores Koca’s greatest strength: her ability to find the tragedy, irony and humor in the immigrant experience, showing us how global power has warped our ability to find happiness and to even know what happiness is.
This is a powerful book that pinpoints exactly where our contradictions lie. It is so powerful, in fact, that it can do all this while still making you laugh.
Immigrant and refugee experiences can be surreal and nightmarish, but for those lucky enough to reach their destination, life can be filled with a sudden Kafkaesque dark humor. Such is the case for Nazlı Koca’s protagonist, Leyla.
Essayist, novelist and Seattle University professor Sonora Jha follows up her acclaimed memoir, How to Raise a Feminist Son (2021), with her second novel, The Laughter, a masterfully told, thrilling investigation of privilege, heritage and exoticisation set against the backdrop of the American college campus.
The novel centers on Dr. Oliver Harding, a middle-aged white male professor at a liberal arts university in Seattle. Oliver is an accomplished academic, best known for his research into the early 20th-century English writer G.K. Chesterton. Oliver’s personal life, however, is solitary and unfulfilling. His strained relationship with his daughter is his only meaningful one.
Oliver becomes fixated on Ruhaba Khan, a Muslim professor in the university’s law school and a political firestarter on campus. Ruhaba has recently taken in Adil Alam, her teenage nephew from France who is seeking to distance himself from some trouble back home. Oliver begins mentoring Adil in an effort to impress Ruhaba, through privately Oliver exhibits contempt for and mistrust of their Muslim heritage.
In addition to their personal entanglement, Oliver and Ruhaba find themselves on opposite sides of a political upheaval on campus, where an energized and diverse collective of students is attempting to seize power from privileged white faculty members who fear their own irrelevancy. These personal and political matters lead to a heartbreaking conclusion, one which readers have been warned is coming but is made no less shocking by its inevitability.
Deeply complex and meaningful yet still an enthralling read, The Laughter is an ambitious novel that explores American social dynamics while never being preachy or overbearing. Jha’s characters represent vastly disparate political ideas, but she handles each of them with great precision and care. With this novel, she offers us a creative window into the sociopolitical dynamics that continue to reinforce cultural divisions in this country. It’s a must-read for those seeking to understand today and dream of a better tomorrow.
Sonora Jha’s characters represent vastly disparate political ideas, but she handles each of them with great precision and care. With this novel, she offers us a creative window into the sociopolitical dynamics that continue to reinforce cultural divisions in this country.
“A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself.”
And with this set of lines, author Geetanjali Shree drops us into the deep waters of her expansive stream-of-consciousness novel, Tomb of Sand. With echoes of James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Leo Tolstoy, it seems almost inevitable that this novel was destined to garner the lit-crit clique’s affection, and indeed it has already racked up the prestigious International Booker Prize, the first novel written in any Indian language to do so.
This is a novel that rewards patience and leisurely reading; after all, its main protagonist, 80-year-old Ma, doesn’t even get out of bed for the first quarter of the book. When she does get up, she goes on walkabout, leaving her son Bade’s home. Ultimately, after 13 hours—or days or weeks, according to the shape-shifting narrator—Ma decides to live with her journalist daughter, Beti, instead. Free from the overbearing nature of Bade’s oversight, Ma decides to undertake a trip to her native Pakistan (which, when she was born, was part of India).
At its heart, Tomb of Sand is a tale of borders—of politics, gender, religion, behavior and relationships—and one woman’s resolute unwillingness to accept them as a restriction. After Ma delivers a long soliloquy on the nature of borders to a Pakistani official, she concludes with some simple advice that is at once timely and transcendent: “Do not accept the border. Do not break yourself into bits with the border. There’s only us. If we don’t accept, this boundary won’t stay.”
Special notice should be given here to Shree’s American translator, Daisy Rockwell. While some critics have found her adherence to the original Hindi excessive—a point of view I am not capable of evaluating, since I don’t speak Hindi—she has an excellent ear for capturing the rhythm of Indian speech, as rendered here in Ma’s internal and external dialogue about getting up:
No, now I won’t get up: who was playing with the fear and death of that phrase? These mechanical words became magical, and Ma kept repeating them, but they were becoming something else, or already had.
An expression of true desire or the result of aimless play?
No, no, I won’t get up. Noooooo, I won’t rise nowwww. Nooo rising nyooww. Nyooo riiise nyoooo. Now rise new. Now, I’ll rise anew.
Tomb of Sand is not a simple, linear book. It requires attention, and unless you’re fluent in Hindi, you can expect to be Googling some passages. But if you can strap yourself in, you’ll find yourself taken for an enchanting ride.
Tomb of Sand is a tale of borders—of politics, gender, religion, behavior and relationships—and one woman’s resolute unwillingness to accept them as a restriction.
In Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez, the titular character, who’s a successful wedding planner, and her brother, Prieto, who’s a congressman, are both prominent members of their Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, New York. The two were brought up by their grandmother after their mother, Blanca, deserted them to become a political activist. Their lives are turned upside down when Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico and an unexpected family reunion ensues. Gonzalez enriches this funny, stirring story with themes of loyalty, honesty and forgiveness, and reading groups will find plenty to talk about in her provocative novel.
Kimberly Duffy’s remarkable mother-daughter tale, The Weight of Air, is set in the intriguing world of turn-of-the-century circus performers. It’s 1911, and Mabel MacGinnis, known as Europe’s strongest woman, is a member of the Manzo Brothers Circus. After the death of her father, Mabel decides to find her mother, an aerialist named Isabella Moreau. When the two finally meet, Isabella must come to terms with herself, even as she and Mabel adjust to their roles as mother and daughter. Past and present collide in Duffy’s fascinating chronicle of circus life.
In Chibundu Onuzo’s Sankofa, Anna, a middle-aged woman living in London, decides to find her father, whom she has never met. Anna comes across his diaries among the possessions of her late mother and learns that he pursued politics, becoming president of a tiny West African country. After discovering that he is still alive, Anna sets out to find him in what turns about to be the quest of a lifetime. Filled with humor and compassion, Onuzo’s novel is a rich exploration of race, identity and the nature of family.
Set in Quebec, Joanna Goodman’s The Home for Unwanted Girls is a moving portrayal of family dynamics in the 1950s. When English-speaking Maggie Hughes falls for a French-speaking boy and becomes pregnant, her parents insist that she give up the child: a girl named Elodie. Although she comes of age in a miserable orphanage, Elodie’s spirit and intelligence blossom. Maggie eventually marries, and when she decides to locate Elodie, her life is changed forever. Discussion topics such as motherhood and the meaning of home make Goodman’s novel a great choice for book clubs.
These unforgettable novels explore the drama and devotion bound up with family ties.
“It’s important for me to transgress. It’s important for me to be subversive,” says novelist, essayist and professor Sonora Jha (How to Raise a Feminist Son) during a video call to her home in Seattle, Washington. “For those of us on the margins, I think having our agency and transgressing like crazy will better everything.”
The Laughter is subversive in its approach, form and content. As an authentic and nuanced character study, it demands that readers grapple with issues of race, sexuality, power, tradition and academia. It carefully and systematically explores how conflicts over privilege and control are enacted on our minds and bodies.
The story centers on Oliver Harding, a middle-aged white male English professor at a liberal arts college in Seattle. Oliver is a decorated academic whose personal and professional identity is wrapped up in the focus of his research, the early 20th-century British writer G.K. Chesterton. Divorced from his wife, his relationship with his daughter strained, Oliver turns his focus on Ruhaba Khan, a Muslim law professor at the university. Ruhaba is dealing with the reality of being a woman of color on a predominately white campus while building a relationship with Adil Alam, her nephew who recently emigrated from France after getting into some trouble.
Both Oliver and Ruhaba find themselves caught up in social upheaval on campus, as a multicultural student movement demanding progressive transformations draws ire of aging white faculty. This mixture of personal and political turmoil makes for a contemplative yet thrilling and ultimately devastating read.
While certainly a work of fiction, The Laughter pulls from Jha’s journalistic background, her experiences as a faculty member at Seattle University and her life as an American immigrant. (She grew up in Mumbai, India.) The seeds of the book were planted in 2016, after Jha learned that French towns were beginning to ban burkinis, swimwear that covers both the head and body to align with Muslim values. The bans appeared after a terrorist attack in Nice and reflected forced Muslim assimilation into French secular culture. This attempt to regulate Muslim identity prompted her to consider the visceral impact of both anti-Muslim conditioning and cultural marginalization in general, both central themes in The Laughter. “I definitely wanted to build a story around them. And I kept visualizing this image of this boy watching his mother being asked to take off her hijab,” she says.
Jha explains that Oliver is the type of man who obsessively fights for control, both in his personal life and in society at large. He’s seemingly at odds with himself, and due to his own personal failings, he lives a lonely life. Despite this, he exhibits an intense sense of entitlement and a need for authority over both Ruhaba and the on-campus protests.
Men like Oliver, says Jha, “are all around us. They’re in academia. They’re our friends. I have felt that sense of control [from them], especially the moments in which they feel like they are losing that control or handing it over to someone else. This happens even if they were encouraging you all along. I’ve had experiences where mentors of mine, when I finally came into my power, were like, ‘Wait, you’re supposed to be grateful. You’re supposed to take up just enough space as I give to you.’ . . . It’s almost like they will mentor you and give you just enough, but they want to still be in charge.”
“It was creepy that this voice already existed and is the literary voice in my imagination.”
A reader could wonder how Jha, a woman of Indian descent, was able to provide such a richly authentic first-person portrayal of a privileged middle-aged white man. She notes that she first attempted to write the novel in third person, but almost in an instinctive way, the first-person voice began to take over her writing. She believes that it emerged, forcefully, out of a lifetime of engaging with Western literature.
“This white male voice is so dominant in my imagination because this is who we read when I was growing up in India,” she says. “It was creepy that this voice already existed and is the literary voice in my imagination.” To further capture the voice, she immersed herself in the white male literary canon. “As the rest of the world was starting to read more women of color, I was reading the likes of John Updike and Saul Bellow,” she quips.
From Oliver’s perspective, we witness his insidious exoticization, shown most prominently through his sexual attraction to Ruhaba and his suspicions of Adil. Oliver fixes his sexual gaze on the parts of Ruhaba’s appearance that are nonwhite; he has both a figurative and literal fetish for her Indian-ness. At the same time, he responds to her nonphysical differences with confusion and disgust. Similarly, Oliver perceives Adil’s identity as a dangerous “otherness” that needs to be surveilled, tested and controlled.
Jha explains that this two-faced response is a common conflict that immigrants face in their interpersonal relationships. “You have to be exotic enough for me to fetishize you, but not so much that it’s a whole other thing that I have to deal with,” she says. “I will provide for you, and I will protect you from your own kind who are not good for you, but to be in my protection, you have to be a little bit more like me.”
“That’s the part of me that is maybe reflected in Ruhaba, that I exist on the fringes of every sense of community.”
Despite Oliver’s control over the narrative, Ruhaba emerges as a deeply complicated character full of internal conflicts. As a Muslim immigrant woman, she exhibits a seemingly naive hope about the possibilities of American life that’s at odds with the fetishizing, distrust and exclusion that is enacted upon her. She also wears a hijab despite her complicated feelings about her Muslim heritage.
Author Sonora Jha
“For immigrant women, I think there’s the excitement of coming to a place that promises all kinds of freedoms, but there’s also the pressure to conform to a certain sort of cultural performance, because we need community,” Jha says. “That’s the part of me that is maybe reflected in Ruhaba, that I exist on the fringes of every sense of community. We crave belonging and community, but we don’t want it to be prescribed for us. So Ruhaba’s relationship with the hijab is a way to control her own appearance and her own relationships with people, on campus or otherwise.”
Adil is also a beautifully crafted character who exhibits a level of complexity that we rarely see in depictions of young men of color. A teenage boy who is as sensitive as he is intelligent, Adil is willing to be open about his hopes and his fears. At the same time, his urge to protect is what upends his life on multiple occasions. In the spirit of How to Raise a Feminist Son, Jha uses Adil’s character to explore and challenge constructions of masculinity. “When can we tell our boys that you don’t have to connect with this toxic masculinity of protector and provider?” Jha asks. “I wanted Adil to have that tenderness, and even a refusal of that kind of masculinity.”
“When can we tell our boys that you don’t have to connect with this toxic masculinity of protector and provider?”
The college campus is very much a character in the novel as well. It is a force with its own nuances and actions, and competing groups of social actors seek to harness this energy to execute their own visions of the future. Political dialogue is often reduced to simply right versus left, but Jha’s depiction of campus life complicates this, showing how political conflicts are often rooted in issues of power and privilege. Innovative graduate students are attempting to transform the campus into a more inclusive and progressive space. Meanwhile, white middle-aged tenured professors, who once considered themselves progressive, are actively resisting this change. This results in a series of microaggressions and racist commentaries that undermine the college’s purported liberalism.
“I think what’s happening with white folks in academia is a sense of displacement, the worry that fun can be had without them, that there’s a lot of brilliance that is ‘not of my kind,’” Jha says. “BIPOC folks and other folks are redefining culture. So we keep hearing these white academics say, ‘We worked hard’ or ‘There are more restrictions for us’ or ‘We played by the rules,’ because any kind of displacement is going to cause discomfort, even in the life of the mind.”
“Decenter the white male narrative and the white imagination on our campuses, and it can only enrich things and make us more comfortable.”
Despite the rampant personal and political turmoil, The Laughter is not a nihilistic story, due to a throughline of hope from the student body. They channel a transformative energy. “I advise the newspaper on my campus, and the kids truly believe in something, and they truly care about change,” Jha says. The novel’s students display unapologetic ideological independence and an unflinching courage to stand up for themselves, which means sometimes standing against faculty and administration.
To BIPOC people working in academia and other white-dominated spaces, Jha offers a sharp final word of advice: “Find your own people and have your own agency, and let’s see what [we] do,” she says. “Decenter the white male narrative and the white imagination on our campuses, and it can only enrich things and make us more comfortable.”
Photos of Sonora Jha by Josiane Faubert.
The author of How to Raise a Feminist Son sharpens the campus obsession novel into a brilliant indictment of exoticization.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. If you’re looking for quiet desperation in modern-day America, you’d be hard-pressed for a better place to find it than the “dubiously named” Oasis Mobile Estates in Riverside County, California, the setting of Asale Angel-Ajani’s debut novel, A Country You Can Leave.
Russian-born single mom Yevgenia Borislava and her Afro-Cuban daughter, Lara, have alighted on this repository of broken dreams, the latest in a string of temporary addresses the two have occupied for all of Lara’s life. At 16, Lara finds herself on the awkward cusp of adulthood, a situation that’s difficult enough without her strained relationship with Yevgenia and her yearning for a long-absent father whom she knows only through her mother’s possibly unreliable stories.
On top of that, Lara’s economic situation is brought into high relief due to a zoning mistake that lands her in a high school intended for the nearby gated community that, economically speaking, might as well be on another planet. At school, Lara surrounds herself with a small diverse group that includes a gay Black aspiring poet named Charles and a compulsive white shoplifter named Julie, both of whom find Yevgenia more fascinating—or at least less embarrassing—than Lara does.
For most of the novel, readers are treated to the passive-aggressive back-and-forth between a mother and daughter who haven’t quite learned a healthy way to express their devotion to one another, until a violent altercation with an outsider becomes the crucible in which their relationship will either be forged or splinter irrevocably.
Angel-Ajani’s unflinching portrait of this hypernuclear family is captivating and complex, with a richly drawn supporting cast and occasional arch humor that leavens the intensely emotional backdrop. A Country You Can Leave gives voice to a group of star-crossed characters struggling to transcend Thoreau’s trap.
Asale Angel-Ajani’s unflinching portrait of a hypernuclear family is captivating and complex, with a richly drawn supporting cast and occasional arch humor that leavens the intensely emotional backdrop.
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