THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 25
You will be asked to meetings with
studio executives and hired to write
television shows that never get made.
You will be invited to give speeches
and to sit on theatre boards; you may
attend functions at the home of a bil-
lionaire like James Murdoch to ask
millionaires to donate to organizations
like PEN America, which you might
eventually be called upon to head—as
Akhtar was, earlier this month. But
that all comes later, after the phone
call that sends you shooting fifteen
feet into the air. Winning the Pulit-
zer, Akhtar said, was “a pleasure as
subtle and complete as any I’ve ever
known.” He took the prize as encour-
agement to make the most ambitious
work about the biggest subject he could
imagine: money.
Back when Akhtar was in his twen-
ties and broke, his parents made a deal
with him. They would send him ten
thousand dollars a year if he read the
Wall Street Journal every day to learn
how to invest it. The nineties bull mar-
ket was beginning, and the whole city
seemed money-crazed. Akhtar got
hooked on his assignment. He started
reading Barron’s and The Economist, too.
He studied books about economic the-
ory and pored over price-to-earnings
ratios, looking for an edge.
Akhtar had grown up with his fa-
ther’s idea of American culture: Coca-
Cola, Lana Turner, the Kennedys, op-
portunity, abundance. But the more he
learned about finance the more he came
to believe that money was the root of
the whole system. You can have what
you can pay for: that was the social con-
tract. And, more often than not, what
you could pay for was debt. “Interest
is a sin in Islam,” he told me. “So the
fact that Western finance is entirely
predicated on the concept of interest?
Growing up Muslim gave me a differ-
ent perspective on that, and a kind of
fascination with it.”
“The Invisible Hand,” which Akhtar
wrote before his Pulitzer, premièred in
- The play draws a connection be-
tween international capitalism and
international Islamic terrorism, two sys-
tems that wreak havoc on much of the
world for the gain of the few. The au-
dience is invited to identify with Nick,
an American investor who has fallen
prey to Pakistani terrorists—but it is
his captor Bashir, a young, working-class
British jihadi, who ends up winning its
affections. Kehlmann told me that “The
Invisible Hand,” which is fast-paced
and gripping, “is the funniest Marxist
play I’ve ever read.”
The Pulitzer gave Akhtar the power
to explore such ideas on a larger scale.
“I liked having the pressure, having
the stakes,” he said. He started to imag-ine a muscular, glossy production about
finance that could hold up a mirror to
a high-powered Broadway audience
as Shakespeare had done by staging
plays about royalty for Queen Eliza-
beth and King James at the Globe.
“Junk,” which opened at Lincoln Cen-
ter Theatre in October of 2017, deals
with the nineteen-eighties corporate
raiders who grew rich by hastening
the decline of American industry
and the working class, but it is not en-
tirely unsympathetic to them. The
play’s protagonist, Robert Merkin, who
is based on the leveraged-buyout pi-
oneer Michael Milken, is a Jew who
outsmarts a snobbish Connecticut
competitor to force his way in. “Junk”
is loosely modelled on Shakespeare’s
history plays, both in the scope of its
theme—the shift in American eco-
nomic and political power, as Akhtar
puts it, between “those who make
things and those who raise the money
for those who make things”—and in
its structure. There are thirty charac-
ters, including dealmaking kings,
boardroom-adviser classes, and com-
mon folk, represented by the workers
at the steel company that Merkin is
ruthlessly dismantling.
Akhtar did pretty well as a self-
taught investor, but he got out long
ago. “There’s something deeply, deeply
immoral about the way that the na-
tional infrastructure has become teth-
ered to the underlying market-cap val-
ues of private organizations,” he told
me. “It speaks to the despoiling of thenation.” He found himself broke again
in his thirties; the sale of “American
Dervish” bailed him out. There is vin-
dication in having made his way
through his writing. He bet on him-
self, and won.L
ast year, when Akhtar had nearly
finished writing “Homeland Ele-
gies,” his brother called. Their father
had fallen and hit his head. Akhtar
flew to the Milwaukee I.C.U. Masood
had suffered a subdural hematoma,
partly related to his alcoholism. He
died on the first day of Ramadan—as
Akhtar’s mother had, from cancer, two
years earlier.
“I loved my father so much,” Akhtar
told me. “He was such an extraordi-
nary, generous, brilliant man. There’s
something about being in the world
that I learned from him, about being
able to stand in your own being. But,
you know, he was such a tortured guy,
too.” He hoped that “Homeland El-
egies” dramatized their conflictual but
close relationship—one filled with
passionate disagreements and thorny
mutual attempts at understanding—
in a way that would have done Masood
proud. “I had to always say to myself,
‘Would Dad understand?’ And I al-
ways, for whatever reason, came to
the conclusion that, yes, he would. He
would get that there are things big-
ger than himself, and things bigger
than me.”
“Homeland Elegies” was written
before Masood died, but somehow
its version of his departure amplifies
the real one, and feels no less true. The
body of the novel is brought to a close
there—but Akhtar isn’t quite done. In
a coda, he replays the thunderous, ve-
hement theme of his overture, this time
in a defiantly major key.
“I always knew that at the end of
the book there would have to be some
affirmation of American identity, not-
withstanding all of the critique,” Akhtar
told me. It’s a threshold moment, look-
ing at once back and forward. With the
publication of “Homeland Elegies,”
Akhtar feels that he may be finished
treating subjects that have obsessed him
from his earliest days. “It’s a lifetime’s
kindling that finally found an igniting
story,” he said. Time to set fire to some-
thing new.