20 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
trompe-l’oeil striptease, enticing readers
with the promise of personal disclosure
without ever revealing whether or not
they have glimpsed actual flesh. The
effect can be salacious, even inflamma-
tory. The novel, which turns on Akhtar’s
sense of alienation as a Muslim man in
the United States after September 11th,
leans into provocation: we see the nar-
rator fucking a white woman in an ec-
stasy fuelled by racial fetishism and hos-
tility, and watch as he trades on his
cultural capital to become, as he causti-
cally puts it, “a neoliberal courtier, a sub-
altern aspirant to the ruling class.” Indhu
Rubasingham, the artistic director of
London’s Kiln Theatre, who became
close to Akhtar after directing a produc-
tion of “The Invisible Hand,” told me,
“For a Muslim-American man, writing
a novel where people aren’t going to
know what is true and what is not is re-
ally audacious and brave.”
Akhtar considers that risk to be its
own reward. “I have some anarchist in-
stinct, some righteous impulse toward
disorder,” he told me. People had been
asking him why he didn’t just write a
memoir. “And my response to that is
because there was a particular quality
that I wanted to get to, something about
the audience and the decay of their re-
lationship with reality, and the collapse
of truth into entertainment.” He wanted
to devise “a strategy that was going to
make its peace with this, not as a cri-
tique but as a seduction.”
If there is something Trumpian in
the idea of reeling in a reality-addled
public through a craftily manipulated
persona, the echo is intentional. The
President looms over “Homeland Ele-
gies.” He’s there, in spirit, in the nov-
el’s bilious, bleak prelude, and is named
in the first sentence of the book’s first
chapter. But so is Akhtar’s immigrant
father, a prominent Wisconsin cardi-
ologist who, he writes—perhaps truth-
fully, perhaps not—treated Trump in
the nineteen-eighties and voted for him
in 2016. Akhtar’s personal and political
struggles with his father are at the emo-
tional core of “Homeland Elegies.” One
of the novel’s theses is that Trump is
the logical outcome of the country’s
trajectory in the past half century, the
period during which Akhtar’s parents
put down their roots. These facts,
Akhtar came to believe, were inter-
twined; to get at what had landed a
demagogue in the White House, he
had to take aim at himself.A
khtar’s American story begins in
Pakistan. His parents met as medi-
cal students in Lahore, and married just
before Akhtar’s father, Masood, immi-
grated to the United States, in 1968, to
pursue a medical residency. His wife,
Khurshid, a radiologist, soon joined
him. Akhtar was born on Staten Is-
land in 1970. When he was four, the
family moved to Wisconsin’s Wauke-
sha County—a Republican stronghold,
ninety-three per cent white, that was
last carried by a Democrat in a Presi-
dential election in 1964—so that Masood
could open a cardiology clinic in neigh-
boring Milwaukee.
The marriage was fraught. Masood,
a pioneer in the treatment of arrhyth-
mia with electrophysiology, was beloved
by his patients and respected in his field.
Gregarious and irrepressible, he was prone
to astonishing gestures of generosity;
once, he sold his Audi to the valet at a
favorite restaurant for a dollar. To his
family, though, he could be selfish and
unreliable; he gambled, drank heavily,
and made little attempt to hide his wom-
anizing. Akhtar, as the elder child, became
his mother’s confidant and crutch—“a
variation of the classic Oedipal dilemma.”
(He has a brother, seven years younger.)
This troubled dynamic is on full display
in “American Dervish,” a novel that hedoes not mind acknowledging as straight-
forwardly autobiographical. Masood was
unfazed by the portrayal. “Some people
say you make me look bad,” he told
Akhtar. “Other people say I’m a hero.”
Cultural factors contributed to his
parents’ friction, too. Akhtar’s father em-
braced life in the United States, whose
freedoms and possibilities matched his
outsized appetites. “He made and lost
two fortunes,” Akhtar told me: millions
in investments that went boom, thenbust. But Khurshid remained critical of
her adoptive home. In a crucial moment
in “Disgraced,” the play’s protagonist
admits that he felt a measure of pride
on September 11th. In “Homeland El-
egies,” Akhtar attributes the same sen-
timent to his mother. “Our blood is
cheap,” she says, years before the attacks
take place. “They deserve what they got,
and what they’re going to get.” He took
his parents’ opposing perspectives as the
novel’s poles. “One is infantile, rampant,
moneyed individualism, an outrageous
vision of American exceptionalism,” he
said. “And, on the other hand, post-
colonial rage—an outrageous vision of
an American critique.”
Akhtar’s parents were the first in their
families to emigrate, and they spent long
vacations visiting relatives in Pakistan,
where Akhtar, the firstborn son of a first-
born son, was lovingly fussed over. While
the men went off to hunt, he stayed in-
side drinking tea with the women, ab-
sorbing their Punjabi chat and gossip.
“I was really into the domestic interior,
family dramas,” he said. One aunt loved
Shakespeare; another enthralled him
with stories of the Prophet Muhammad.
Embedding in this protected female
space helped him make better sense of
his mother. “Her pain was, in large part,
the pain of being a woman in a culture
that made it very hard to be a woman,”
he said. “I saw all of her sisters go through
this dilemma. Very smart, charismatic,
resourceful women who were subordi-
nated, and separated.”
Influenced, in part, by his religious
relatives, he developed an interest in Islam
that soon turned to devotion, an expe-
rience that he mined in “American Der-
vish,” whose protagonist yearns to be-
come a hafiz, someone who knows the
entire Quran by heart. Akhtar had to
beg his openly dismissive father to take
him to pray at Milwaukee’s mosque. “I
have an abiding interest in things that
the somewhat narrow middle of con-
temporary Western life—economized
life, if you will—tends to ignore,” he said.
“The sort of declivitous lows and ecstatic
highs. I was very interested in religion
because it seemed to be the only thing
that spoke to that register of experience.”
The religious fervor soon burned off.
“Early on, I recognized—I won’t put it
generously—the abject stupidity of think-
ing that I must know something that