THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 21
other people don’t, and that I must be
right because I was born into something,”
Akhtar said. (These days, he and Boras
practice meditation.) His quest for the
sublime found a new outlet when he saw
“The Empire Strikes Back”—the Da-
gobah swamp blew his mind—and, later,
in high school, when a teacher intro-
duced him to European modernist lit-
erature. He decided that he wanted to
be a writer, and the conviction deepened
when he studied with the Americanist
Mary Cappello at the University of Roch-
ester, where he matriculated before trans-
ferring to Brown for his sophomore year.
(Cappello, who appears in the novel as
a beloved professor named Mary Mo-
roni, told me that she still sends Akhtar
detailed critiques of his work.)
Akhtar found early success in a cre-
ative-writing class in Rochester, with a
short story about a burial gone awry in
Pakistan. Impressed, the professor offered
to connect him with literary editors at
various illustrious magazines. Akhtar
was elated, then frozen by doubt. What
if the story was a fluke? He fell into a
crushing depression. It was years before
he showed his fiction to anyone else.
I
n July, Akhtar spent the better part of
a week at the sound director Robert
Kessler’s studio in Katonah, recording
the audiobook of “Homeland Elegies.”
On the afternoon that I visited, he was
preparing to read a chapter called “On
Pottersville,” which begins with a charged
conversation the narrator has with a Black
libertarian friend who is explaining why
he votes Republican. Kessler, who has
shoulder-length white hair and an as-
pect of relaxed competence, adjusted his
blue medical mask and settled himself
at the soundboard as Akhtar shut him-
self into a booth in an adjacent room.
“Let me know when you’re rolling,
dude,” Akhtar said. Kessler gave him the
O.K., and Akhtar launched into an epi-
graph from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which
opens the section: “Just remember this,
Mr. Potter: that this rabble you’re talking
about—they do most of the working
and paying and living and dying in this
community. Well, is it too much to have
them work and pay and live and die in
a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”
Breaking for breath, he said, “I know
it sounded nothing like Jimmy Stewart.”
“That’s a good thing,” Kessler said.
Akhtar feels that his books find their
truest form in his performance of them.
He takes special pleasure in rendering
his parents’ accents: his mother’s lightly
wheedling tone; his father’s comical bom-
bast. As he read, he shaped the air with
his hands, marking rhythm. “Fuck m e , ”
he muttered as he stumbled on a word.
“Robert was telling me that people swal-
low a lot of air when they’re doing this,
so that’s why I’m burping a lot.”
“I keep telling him he doesn’t have
to be so polite about it, to just let it out,”
Kessler said.
Akhtar discovered acting at Roch-
ester, and transferred to Brown to pur-
sue it. The program was like a conser-
vatory: he was in acting class two hours
a day, four days a week, and otherwise
translating, directing, producing, and
performing. At the end of Akhtar’s se-
nior year, Andre Gregory gave a talk
on campus. “I basically accosted him,”
Akhtar recalled. “I said, ‘I’m a big fan
of your work, especially the spiritual di-
mension of what you’re doing. I know
you’re good friends with Jerzy Gro-
towski,’” the avant-garde Polish direc-
tor. Akhtar had become infatuated with
Grotowski’s spiritual predecessor, George
Gurdjieff, the early-twentieth-century
Armenian mystic who encouraged his
followers to awaken a higher conscious-
ness through music and dance. “Gurd-
jieff is dead,” he told Gregory. “So I want
to work with Grotowski.”
Two weeks later, Akhtar skipped
graduation and flew to Grotowski’s in-
stitute in Tuscany. “His whole thing was
about trying to find ways to gain access
to a kind of animal state, what he would
call an ‘organicity,’” Akhtar said. Gro-
towski led his acolytes through six-
teen-hour days that began in the mid-
dle of the afternoon and went past dawn,
exhausting them to the point of break-
through, or breakdown. “He and maybe
one other person in my life have set a
certain bar of what’s possible, intellec-
tually, creatively,” Akhtar told me. Still,
there was something cultish about a
cloistered environment devoted to a
theatrical genius who had stopped mak-
ing theatre. When the actors performed,
they faced an empty chair.
Some people spent a decade or more
at the institute. Akhtar lasted a year. He
and his girlfriend, a Frenchwoman whom
he had met while studying abroad, and
later married, moved to New York, where
they lived in a studio apartment on Sec-
ond Avenue. He began working as Greg-
ory’s assistant, helping to rehearse Greg-
ory’s production of “Uncle Vanya” with
Julianne Moore and Wallace Shawn in
the spectacularly dilapidated old Am-
sterdam Theatre. Louis Malle turned
the production into the movie “Vanya
“Actually, I kind of wish it were quicker.”
• •
