What drives someone to join ISIS? Last year, I devoured Joby Warrick’s Pulitzer Prize winning Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS in two days. It’s a gripping non-fiction work with an uncanny ability to drop us in the thick of momentous events. Yet, learning about what transpired is very different from understanding why they happened. Laleh Khadivi’s latest, the remarkable A Good Country , proves that fiction may be better suited for getting us into such characters’ heads and understanding how radicalisation takes root. Khadivi’s novel takes adolescence, that fraught period with changing social allegiances, romantic heartbreak, and defiance of family, and places it within the American pressure cooker of Islamophobic tensions. The result is one of the richer bildungsromans I’ve read in a while.
Coming to grips
The novel follows high-schooler Rez Courdee, the son of affluent Iranian immigrants in Laguna Beach, California. He surfs, attends parties, and skips school with the (appropriately named) apostles, whose penchant for drug use and rule-breaking would put characters in Skins to shame. After a trip to Mexico ends disastrously and alienates Rez from his peers, he befriends easy going Syrian-Americans, Arash and Fatima. When the Boston Marathon bombing inflames racial tensions in his largely white school, Rez has to come to grips with the Islamic heritage he has mostly ignored.
Post 9/11, a new generation of authors have successfully depicted narratives of radicalisation as products of Western culture not threats emanating outside it. Like Mohsin Hamid, in his wry masterpiece The Reluctant Fundamentalist , Khadivi is largely interested in the ideological implications of radicalisation. The threat of terrorism isn’t used as a ticking time bomb to infuse tension into her narrative. The battlefield isn’t America or Syria but Rez’s mind.
“Events come from the events before them,” Rez portentously ruminates and it is the case with A Good Country , the third in a patrilineal trilogy. The first, Age of Orphans , starts in 1921 in Iran and focuses on Rez’s grandfather, a Kurd whose parents are massacred by the Shah’s army. The second, The Walking, follows his father, Saladin’s attempt to make a life for himself as a young refugee in the U.S. Other than a few stray references, including an obtrusive one where Rez discovers a photo of his grandfather, A Good Country works as a standalone read.
In Khadivi’s nomadic world where people are physically and culturally displaced, violence seems to be the only heirloom fathers unwittingly bequeath to their sons. Rez even wonders if he and his friends are miniature versions of their fathers. The expectations placed on Rez by Saladin are to follow in his footsteps by becoming an example of the American model minority. However, like many defiant teenagers, Rez actively resists turning into his father.
Khadivi’s novel also thankfully doesn’t fall into simplistic binaries of liberated American values and regressive Islamic ones. It is more interested in navigating masculine identity and mining the totalitarian nature of brotherhood, both of which require a ceding of individuality. Early on, Rez is as casually racist as the privileged white people he surrounds himself with. He bemoans the dirty beaches in Mexico and disparagingly notes that an Asian woman looks fifteen. He is also called out by Arash for being startled by a black man in a car next to theirs. As Rez gets alienated, it’s his Islamic heritage that binds him to the charismatic Arash and the novel brings up interesting questions. Is Rez merely replacing his totalitarian Eurocentric dogma with an Islamic one?
So right
Khadivi audaciously suggests there is little difference between a spiritual Islamic awakening and the euphoric discoveries of adolescence. Rez makes out with a girl in a prayer room with a framed portrait of Mecca on the wall. After Friday prayers with Arash he declares “That felt so good. So right,” like he was describing a joint. Arash himself generously doles out weed and Islamic lessons in equal measure.
Above all, A Good Country primarily rests on its fascinating protagonist. Initially, Rez comes off as an idealistic blank slate protagonist. So, when he throws off his California surfer persona and starts flirting with Islam, it turns him into even more of an enigma. Occasionally, his opacity can be frustrating. Rez’s reaction to a security’s agent xenophobic diatribe after a trip to Indonesia is exasperatingly muted. Yet, we slowly manage to uncover him. For Rez, self-transformation is key to becoming a man. Americanness is all-encompassing and stifling but his tryst with radical Islam isn’t to do with hatred towards it. It’s driven by disaffection with himself and a need to find love and acceptance.
By the end, it doesn’t matter which path Rez takes. The real tragedy, the novel seems to imply, is that Rez’s quest for self-discovery is Sisyphean and that he will continue searching for himself in whichever life he chooses.
An editor at a children’s publishing house, the writer worships at the altar of Michael Chabon.
