THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 19
An idea hit. Why not write to his
own country—to the whole spliced-
together nation, as it seemed on the
verge of splitting apart? Forget the Grac-
chus brothers. Throw off the veil of
metaphor and speak directly.
The result is Akhtar’s second novel,
“Homeland Elegies,” published this
month. The book opens with a letter
addressed “To America”—an “overture,”
Akhtar calls it. In a crescendo of griev-
ance reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg’s
“Howl,” the narrator, who shares Akh-
tar’s name, denounces the nation’s re-
cent sins and failures, citing the decline
of peers and family members who have
been felled by debt, low pay, suicide,
and overdose, “medicated for despair,
anxiety, lack of affect, insomnia, sexual
dysfunction; and the premature cancers
brought on by the chemical shortcuts
for everything from the food moving
through our irritable bowels to the lo-
tions applied to our sun-poisoned skins.”
He rails against the country’s cult of
greed, its prostitution of private life for
public attention, its allegiance to de-
vices that “filled us with the toxic flot-
sam of a culture no longer worthy of
the name,” and swears, on the sacred
memory of Walt Whitman, to give his
own account of the riven nation.
I
visited Akhtar in late June at the mod-
est Greek Revival house in Kinder-
hook, New York, that he bought last
year with his fiancée, Annika Boras, an
actor and director. Ongoing renovations
had left the façade, with its portico of
Doric columns, looking as if it had sur-
vived a small cyclone, though the inte-
rior was intact and comfortable, fur-
nished with Boras’s baby-grand piano
and the largest wall-mounted television
I had ever seen. The couple had de-
camped to the country in early March
from their rental apartment on the
Upper West Side. Since childhood,
Akhtar has had vivid dreams that he
interprets as premonitions. One came
to him just before September 11th, and
another this February, in which he tried
to escape an evil fog that was smother-
ing the world. When the first cases of
the coronavirus were reported in the
city, he and Boras left immediately.
Akhtar starts every morning by read-
ing one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. When
he’s writing, he likes to jot scenes and
themes on index cards, which he tapes
above his desk to arrange and reorder.
Lately, he had been working around the
clock to complete the pilot for his tele-
vision series, but, concerned that early
disclosure of its subject could prove di-
sastrous, he had removed all evidence,
leaving a single card on which he had
written, in Latin, “Vocatus atque non vo-
catus deus aderit.” “It means, ‘Bidden or
not bidden, God is here,’” he said. “It
was a quote that Jung had up in his tower
in Bollingen. It felt appropriate to what
I’d like to think—that the mystery is
present whether or not I’m aware of it.”
Akhtar, who is bald and youthful,
wore elegantly ripped jeans and round,
blue-rimmed glasses; when he took them
off, in moments of distraction or excite-
ment, his eyes looked unguarded and
dreamy. He is gentler in person than he
is on the page, friendly and fluid, ar-
dent in his search for the precise idea,
the right phrase. He exudes a confi-
dence that might border on showman-
ship were he not so intent on poking
at his vulnerabilities. Sitting far apart,
we ate ham sandwiches. “High-octane
pretension,” he said, when I asked him
about his decision to speak, in “Home-
land Elegies,” to America writ large.
But that was customary self-depre-
cation, protective and perfunctory.
Akhtar is serious about his work to a
point that can delight collaborators, or
drive them mad. He and Boras met
when she was cast in an early reading
of “Junk”; they decided not to work to-
gether again. “I get really nervous when
I have a show going up,” he said.
Akhtar has developed a theory of
audience reaction influenced by the psy-
chologist Daniel Kahneman’s book
“Thinking, Fast and Slow,” and its sug-
gestion that the brain processes parcels
of information two and a half minutes
at a time. He adjusts a play’s rhythms
accordingly, spending each preview in
a different part of the theatre to listen
for every missed gasp and laugh. Re-
lentless in his perfectionism, he sees
every new production of a work as a
chance to finally get it right, and was
still tinkering with “Disgraced” when it
went to London, three weeks after the
Pulitzer announcement. “I remember
the Times saying it’s unusual for a writer
to revise a play after winning a Pulit-
zer,” he said. “To which my private re-
sponse was: I didn’t give it a Pulitzer!”
With “Homeland Elegies,” Akhtar
was just as intent on capturing his read-
er’s attention. The novel wears its erudi-
tion boldly. Discourses on Islamic finance,
medical-malpractice suits, and Robert
Bork’s antitrust theory punctuate the
narrative. Writers of the show-don’t-tell
school might worry about didacticism
undermining artistry, but Akhtar has a
different philosophy. “Telling is amaz-
ing—some of my best experiences have
been being told stuff,” he told me.
Akhtar modelled his book’s main sec-
tions on different Tolstoy novellas: “The
Kreutzer Sonata,” for a sequence on sex
and rage; and “Hadji Murad,” for the
bravura middle section about a Muslim
hedge-funder who deploys an ingenious
financing scheme to avenge himself on
American Islamophobia. A final passage
dealing with the decline of Akhtar’s fa-
ther is inspired by “The Death of Ivan
Ilych.” The prose, too, is stippled with
the kind of Latinate vocabulary rarely
seen outside a set of G.R.E. flash cards.
At the same time, Akhtar, aware of
his competition in the attention econ-
omy, wanted the visceral effect of read-
ing the novel to feel like scrolling
through social media, fluid and addic-
tive. “It’s essay,” he said. “It’s memoir.
It’s fiction. It just had to be seamless, in
the way that a platform like Instagram
is seamless. And one of the pivotal di-
mensions of that content is the staging
and curation of the self.”
“Homeland Elegies” seems, at first
blush, to be autofiction, a form in which
the “fiction” is generally considered
secondary to the “auto.” But is the dis-
gruntled, discontented Ayad Akhtar of
“Homeland Elegies” the same Ayad
Akhtar who was genially sitting across
from me, thriving in his work, content
with his personal life? (Boras, a grace-
ful blond woman in clogs, whom Akhtar
had affectionately described as an intro-
vert, briefly slipped into the room during
my visit, kissed Akhtar on the head, and
left.) During this and other conversa-
tions, Akhtar gamely deflected my at-
tempts to pry out what, exactly, was true
in the novel and what wasn’t. “Why does
it matter?” he would ask—although just
when I had assumed that something in
the book hadn’t taken place in life, he
would mention offhandedly that it had.
“Homeland Elegies” performs a kind of
