22 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
on Forty-second Street.” (You can catch
a glimpse of Akhtar, still with hair.) He
taught acting workshops and tried to
start his own company, but his approach
was at odds with commercially minded
New York. “I did a translation of Jean-
Paul Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ that I rehearsed
with three actors for eight months,” he
said. “We never did any performances,
we just continued to rehearse.” Akhtar
prided himself on his artistic purity: “If
you’d told me back then that I would
become a Broadway playwright, I would
have said, ‘Put a bullet in me now.’”
“He was very much opposed to films,”
the director Oren Moverman, Akhtar’s
best friend from those years, told me.
“We had a lot of fun conversations about
why film is no good, where I was there
to defend the love I have for the craft.”
A dream led Akhtar to reconsider
his resistance to what he had previously
rejected as a debased medium. He started
watching movies at a clip of six a day;
within three months, he had seen three
hundred and fifty, working his way
through Hollywood from the thirties
on up before pivoting to Italian neo-
realism, the French New Wave, and Ing-
mar Bergman. (Though his marriage
managed to survive this hermetic boot
camp, the couple split up a few years
later.) In the fall of 1997, Akhtar enrolled
at the Columbia film school. In his first
semester, he directed twelve shorts, one
film a week, a breakneck pace. “I just
needed to learn the language,” he said.
After graduating, he and two class-
mates wrote “The War Within,” a thriller
about a radicalized Pakistani whose plot
to attack New York puts him in conflict
with a friend who has embraced life in
the United States. The movie’s explo-
ration of alienation and allegiance pre-
views similar themes in “Homeland El-
egies.” Akhtar starred as the terrorist.I
n a pivotal scene in “Homeland El-
egies,” Akhtar’s car breaks down in
Pennsylvania. The state trooper who
comes to his assistance is helpful and
friendly, until he asks about Akhtar’s
name. After 9/11, Akhtar tells us, he had
started wearing a cross around his neck,
to ward off suspicion; he tries to dodge
the question, but once the trooper real-
izes that Akhtar is Muslim his attitude
changes, and Akhtar’s subsequent hu-
miliation jostles something loose. “I was
going to stop pretending that I felt
American,” he vows, deciding to change
the focus of his writing accordingly. “Par-
adoxically, these were the works that
would lead to me finally finding my way
as a writer in my American homeland
and to the success that would earn me
enough money to settle my debts and
start making the monthly ends meet.”In his twenties, Akhtar spent years
laboring on a thousand-page novel about
a poet who worked the graveyard shift
entering data at Goldman Sachs. “I was
reading too much Fernando Pessoa,” he
said. The realization that his oblique,
high-modernist project had failed co-
incided with the discovery that he had
a knack for writing things that people
actually liked. After film school, he sup-
ported himself writing scripts such as
“Trash Man,” featuring a mobster placed
in witness protection in Kansas who re-
cruits high-school football players to
help him run a racket. The popular reg-
ister felt right. As a teen-ager, he’d loved
soap operas. “There was something about
campy melodrama that felt real to me,”
he told me. “The melodrama of a Pun-
jabi household is much closer to that
than it is to post-Jacobian naturalism.”
He decided to write a novel that
would be quickly paced but thought-
provoking, set in a world he knew inti-
mately. Still, seven agents passed before
he found one who would represent him;
eventually, Judy Clain, at Little, Brown,
bought the book for a seven-hun-
dred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance.
“There are so many people who are
white who I’ve known who’ve worked
so hard, who have not gotten any breaks,”
Akhtar said. “So to impute the difficul-
ties I’ve had solely to race, I think, would
probably be less than accurate, although
that’s of course been part of it.”
If skeptical publishers had been con-
cerned that “American Dervish” wouldn’t
appeal to white readers, they were proved
wrong. Critics responded warmly. When
I went to Audible to listen to Akhtar’s
performance of the book, I found hun-
dreds of five-star reviews from listen-
ers who, as one wrote, found the milieu
it described to be “both completely for-
eign and painfully familiar.”B
ut making his community accessi-
ble to others was not Akhtar’s only
goal. When he was growing up, he had
been subjected to the double vision com-
mon among first-generation kids. “It
was an awareness that there were two
ways of seeing the world and they were
both probably wrong,” he said. “But
they were both right. American society
was pretty homogeneous where I grew
up. And wonderful. I mean, the kids
were great. The parents were welcom-“Janey! What did I say about drawing on the walls? Perspective!
Balance! Basic compositional principles!”