Palestine on the Hudson

Najla Said, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family

It’s tough for girls growing up amid America’s images of lithe blonde perfection; girls from non-white backgrounds have it even tougher. So imagine how hard it must be if your father is a world-famous spokesperson for one of Earth’s most reviled ethnic groups. Najla Said’s father, Palestinian-American professor Edward Said, changed the intellectual landscape with his classic, Orientalism. But that made life only harder for his daughter.

Already celebrated for her elaborate autobiographical one-woman show, having toured theatres and schools internationally with her tale of divided childhood, Najla Said now expands that story for readers beyond the stage. She proves a remarkably bold storyteller, blunt in her desire to expose the false face she spent years building. But unlike recent “confessional” memoirs, often lurid in their disclosures, Said keeps her story both personal and touchingly humane.

Growing up in Manhattan, Najla knew she didn’t fit in with the “society girls” at her prep school. Nobody else’s dad got regularly interviewed by Ted Koppel. Despite her parents’ pride in their Lebanese-Palestinian heritage, she knew more about Jewish culture than her own. Yet she took these differences for granted, as children do, desperate for life to be normal. But the older she got, the more “normal” became a slippery target.

Said’s memoir of growing up in her father’s long shadow highlights the perils of minority life in modern plural society. She sought her unique identity, separate from her father’s magisterial writing, but could not separate herself from the intellectual, heavily Jewish milieu in which she grew. While her father defended his people’s rights against Israeli and Arab infractions on the nightly news, she sought a cause of her own.

As the Palestinian intifada and Lebanon’s civil war colored global perceptions, Said took marked steps to separate herself from her heritage. She longed for the inclusion of MTV and shopping, and joined her Jewish schoolmates in celebrating World War II heroism. But she couldn’t stop being descended from a long line of Arab Christians. The gap in her heritage began manifesting in strange ways, including a long-simmering battle with anorexia.

Readers must not mistake this memoir for a continuation of Said’s father’s work. Far from his famous academic dissections and literary rhetoric, Najla unpacks private concerns. She tells her story, not pretending to speak for an entire people. Thus, her prose is often episodic, sometimes choppy, but mercifully free of thesis statements and perorations. Said proves George Bernard Shaw’s claim, that only the completely personal can be truly universal.

Attending Princeton as Edward Said’s only daughter proved a strange new minefield. Everyone expected some genius, some spokesperson for a dispossessed people in the halls of academic prestige—and she just wanted to be an undergraduate. The conflicting forces taking pieces of her spirit left her wondering who she was under the layers of learned response. Sadly, no answers were forthcoming.

As adulthood loomed, and Said’s father became ill with the slow cancer that ultimately ended his life, Said discovered she couldn’t sustain the duality that dominated her life. She couldn’t keep her American upbringing in one pocket, and her Arab heritage in another. Especially after 9/11 polarized American discourse, and temporarily made certain racist expressions acceptable again, she had to find some way to reconcile her two halves.

Easier said than done.

But theatre provided the opportunity she desperately needed. She found a company of similar American-born Arabs who simply wanted the opportunity to tell their strange, conflicting stories. Here, she didn’t have to remain eternally eloquent, or be judged as her father’s daughter. Her story became one among a chorus of voices, at a time when curiosity and interest in Middle Eastern peoples reached an all-time high.

Said’s performances have made her a minor star, but not because of some accident of birth. She shows, through simply telling her story, that the personal struggles we all face have their mirror across culture, and race, and class. She has persuaded people, especially young women, that they needn’t face their struggles alone. And she had proven to diverse global audiences that her heritage is an object of beauty.

Najla Said may not be a famous name, not like Edward Said. But in some ways, she’s proven herself her father’s truest heir. While he wrote about vast cultural forces that conspired to create gulfs between peoples, she writes about ordinary experiences that build bridges between individuals. We can’t ignore the heritage of our births, she says. But we can become the architects of our futures.

Twilight of the Godlings

Jason M. Hough, The Darwin Elevator

The Space Elevator rises 40,000 kilometers above Darwin, Australia, humanity’s last city. Its strange alien technology lets humans farm the reaches of space, though nobody understands how it arrived, or why. And nobody understands why its coming corresponded with SUBS, a plague that turns infected humans into ravenous zombies. The Elevator’s Aura protects the city, while Earth beyond has fallen. But something worse may be coming.

Purists may grouse that Jason Hough’s debut novel doesn’t break new ground. The fetish for originality, beloved by writing textbooks, colors many readers’ awareness. But Hough shines new light on science fiction fundamentals, and uses them to bolster a complex, braided narrative. The result resembles the paperbacks I grew up reading thirty years ago, brought laughing and exulting into the Twenty-First Century, where we need such straightforward excitement.

Skyler Luiken lives on the surface and commands a crew of rare “immunes,” people who can breathe beyond the Aura without becoming plague carriers. He commands a salvage crew who haven’t turned a profit in months. A mysterious benefactor contracts Skyler to retrieve stored data that may unlock humanity’s redemption. To find it, he merely needs to venture through the dragon’s teeth, risking his entire crew’s life in the process.

Neil Platz got rich when the aliens planted the Darwin Space Elevator on his property. Only he knows that it wasn’t coincidence. Now in deep orbit, Platz and his chief researcher, Tania Sharma, have a drop-dead deadline. The Builders are returning, their purposes seem less than benign, and humanity’s twilight may be imminent. Here’s hoping human technology has the power to fend off this strange alien twilight.

Russell Blackfield controls the strait between Earth and orbit. The Elevator needs him to replenish their air and water; Darwin needs him to disburse orbital agriculture and manufactures. He’s parlayed this power into a feudal domain. If humanity dies, Blackfield will die last, a godling guarding the road to heaven. But when he discovers Neil Platz’s deal with Skyler Luiken, his ambition shifts, and Earth goes to war with orbit.

As the title implies, this novel posits humanity at evolution’s bottleneck. Anonymous aliens, yclept “Builders” by survivors, force humanity to weed its line. The human race may be as low as one million. But reading, we wonder whether we’ve made defensible evolutionary choices. The learned, pretty, and most important, rich live on the Darwin Elevator. Poor and unconnected, but crafty, groundlings eke out livings, but die in random subhuman attacks.

Arthur C. Clarke’s influence animates this book, which Hough obliquely acknowledges. It even has monoliths, folks! This novel brims with sidelong nods to prior science fiction, because Hough borrows liberally from the genre’s high points. But don’t assume he justs recycles formulae; Hough approaches classic narrative components with brio, telling a story that feels familiar to old genre hands, yet repeatedly hits us with brisk, unexpected slants.

Hough’s characters dare us to trust somebody, but laugh when we dare pick a side. His world brims with antiheroes, concealing vendettas behind bureaucratic handshakes. Seemingly noble pioneers have deeply buried secrets, and not everybody earns the comeuppance they receive. Skyler Luiken seems downright heroic because he doesn’t conceal his motivations: on a dying Earth, he just wants to make a living. Very Mal Reynolds.

Every time we think surely, now, Hough cannot push events any higher, he finds new ways to escalate. Skyler has a particular knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Each chapter we think, surely Hough cannot punish our heroes any more, or reward Blackfield’s ignominy. But rest assured, at nearly 500 pages, Hough has generous opportunities to push characters to new depths and make his readers cringe.

I grew up reading books like this, paperbacks populated by oversized personalities, shifting loyalties, and surprise revelations. Heroes prove themselves by decisive actions, salted with judicious violence; villains marinate in their own venality until they prove their own undoing. Say what you like about John W. Campbell and Alfred Bester, but my Golden Age of Science Fiction was the 1980s, when SF was popular, but still boldly countercultural.

Hough writes in that beloved sci-fi format, the trilogy, and while this novel has a satisfying conclusion, it asks tantalizing questions for future volumes. Del Rey so loves this series that it’s launching the whole trilogy this summer: three novels in three months. Who can blame them? In a crowded, noisy genre, Hough claims territory that deserves our attention. It’s enough to revive my flagging faith in science fiction.

Hell Beneath the Utopian Dome

Maureen McGowan, Compliance (The Dust Chronicles)

Young Glory, a teenager who can kill strangers telepathically, knows the bitter secret that the government would conceal from the domed city of Haven: the outside world isn’t so bad. The Dust that nearly obliterated humanity has dissipated, and with caution, the air is safe. Haven’s constant push through media, school, and every aspect of tightly controlled culture, is a lie. But breaking the silence could merit Glory her death.

Maureen McGowan’s second dystopian thriller covers similar ground as Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, while telling an entirely separate story. McGowan focuses not on how the hierarchy exploits massive poverty, but on how the leadership preserves its feudal privilege by cultivating fear and ignorance. It’s essentially a primer in how bloated post-industrial civilization must court fascism to prevent sweeping social chaos.

Glory studies to become a Compliance Officer, a paramilitary enforcer charged with weeding out Deviants. In her technologically disrupted world, Deviants are rogue mutants whose advanced physical and mental capabilities threaten Haven’s bureaucratic stability. But while training to root out Deviants, Glory also runs secret night missions smuggling Deviants out of the city, while trying to conceal her own Deviant superpower from her commanders.

Readers will undoubtedly recognize McGowan’s historic parallels. Glory serves as a sort of teenage Raoul Wallenberg, using her official standing to subvert the regime that employs her. But the Resistance she assists begins proffering orders Glory finds unethical. When an enigmatic government functionary reveals that not everything Glory knows about the city is necessarily true, she begins questioning her already divided loyalties. Sound familiar?

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

But McGowan doesn’t just exploit the obvious historic themes. She populates Glory’s world with a collusion between immense wealth and a government that maintains the status quo. Citizens can’t speak truth when media, government, and every available source of information recycles the same set of preapproved lies. Even when reality apparently contradicts the official story, the familiar lie has sticking power. Koch Brothers, anyone?

Critic Richard Mathews claims that the best fiction written for youth is only truly comprehensible to adults. By this, he means that while youth may feel deeply the truths underlying books like this one, and understand that this says something about the world they live in. But only adults have enough knowledge, enough experience, enough accumulated wisdom to explain exactly why these books speak to us. And speak this does.

Books like this, The Hunger Games, and Moira Young’s Blood Red Road bespeak a broad gap between the life adults promise to children—hard work will pay off in material rewards later, we can trust authority figures to do right, grown-ups promises are worth the air it takes to speak them—and the reality they see around themselves daily. It must seem to teens that adults lie for practice. As a former teacher, I’m not sure they’re wrong.

McGowan explicitly presents education, or schooling at any rate, as a tool for indoctrination and for squelching the imagination. She depicts one eager student answering a classroom question: “Deviants are different and difference is dangerous.” My fellow public school graduates will recognize the underlying ethos in this statement, as overworked teachers and mocking peers colluded (consciously or not) to silence ambitious or nonconforming students.

Despite their youth, McGowan’s target audience aren’t ignorant. They know their teachers preach a gospel of studiousness and bookish accomplishment, but they face a world where schoolroom performance has less and less to do with their careers. Ain’t no poor kids gonna become hedge fund managers. And with the increasing digitization of white-collar work, college has become a tedious holding pattern, not a key to success.

American society pays homage to values like democracy, capitalism, and initiative, but youth can see this has devolved into lip service. They’re forced to choose between two political parties who agree on too many crucial issues, and care little for society’s poorest. The people working the longest hours are not the people driving the biggest cars. Too often, material success depends your personal network; shade-tree mechanics, not learned geniuses, run the world.

Works like this matter, not just because youth find them entertaining, but because rebellious characters like Glory or Katniss empower readers to resist the blatant lies around them. The essential conservatism of canonical literature classes encourage students to keep quiet and honor the past. McGowan, Collins, and Young enable teens, and adult readers with stifled rebellious youth in their hearts, to believe their ideals have real-world merit.

Jo Nesbø's Global Crime and Crimefighting Network

Jo Nesbø, The Bat: The First Inspector Harry Hole Novel

When Australian police find a beautiful Norwegian expat’s body on a secluded coast, Oslo detective Harry Hole (HOO-leh) joins the Sydney police investigation. But he finds himself stymied by bureaucratic intransigence and Sydney’s carnivalesque gay community. When his prodding uncovers a years-long serial murder spree, Harry sacrifices his sanity and goes off the rails to bring his target down.

Jo Nesbø’s procedurals have earned high praise in his native Norway since his 1997 debut, but his work has dribbled into international markets, completely out of sequence. Nesbø’s English-language publisher calls this “The First Harry Hole Thriller,” and it reflects its dated 1997 setting—we keep forgetting about the scarcity of cell phones or the early, sluggish Web. This gives it a naive quality almost like Agatha Christie.

The story roughly breaks into two halves. In the first, Harry’s local contact, a Europeanized Aboriginal named Andrew Kensington, seems downright uninterested in the case. Andrew drags Harry into a succession of strange meetings, introducing him to a panoply of eccentric characters and colorful personalities. Harry repeatedly complains about Andrew’s seeming wild hairs. But a darkly sophisticated pattern starts to emerge.

As Harry pushes his one lead, one brutal encounter upends everything that came before, forcing Harry, suddenly alone, to track a killer who has taken a sudden interest in Harry. When the killer targets a woman Harry’s taken a shine to, Harry must make an impossible choice: risk the woman he loves or risk losing his quarry. He quickly learns that everything he knows about criminology is flat wrong.

Nesbø distinguishes this thriller from the seemingly limitless interchangeable paperback mysteries with his laser-like focus on character. From the beginning, Harry shows a casual attitude toward procedure, playing his investigation by ear, openly chafing at rules and limitations. His finely-honed intuition leads him to remarkable moments of insight. His Columbo-like gift for “just one more question” repeatedly unlocks the right evidence at the right moment.

But Harry offsets his finely honed investigative discernment with a self-destructive streak like the broad side of a barn. If he feels stymied in the first half, it’s because he’s trying to accommodate official channels. He starts winning against his enemy only when he puts himself in situations that could easily kill him. Criminal scum fears and respects Harry because he’s mere inches removed from becoming one of them.

Not that Harry wants to implode. He tries to do well, follow rules, make friends, and even court a woman. But he sabotages himself so thoroughly, we suspect he’s doing it on purpose. The woman he loves is also a material witness, so their relationship skirts the law, especially when the killer spots her as Harry’s greatest weakness. When the rules impede his investigation, he chooses results over process.

Harry plays the perpetual outsider, asking questions that seem obvious to his colleagues. His unique perspective unblocks longstanding stalemates because he doesn’t share others’ blinders. Important clues lie in Aboriginal myths that the Australian characters have grown bored hearing, but which Harry encounters for the first time. He talks to people he doesn’t know others ignore, and focuses on details others see as mere background.

Which perhaps explains why international readers have embraced Nesbø over the last eight years or so. Though we recognize and understand how Nesbø fits neatly into the genre that gave us Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, he doesn’t share our English-speaking literary expectations; he tells a story for his own native Scandinavian culture. We know what kind of story he’s telling, yet it remains exhilaratingly foreign.

Nesbø’s episodic style takes some getting used to. His very short chapters combine copious dialog and Harry’s internal speculations into an atmosphere unlike typical American or British detective thrillers. Nesbø often introduces characters and details that appear tangential, not just at first, but for many chapters afterward. Only tenacious readers will realize how tightly constructed Nesbø’s prose actually is.

Because at root, Nesbø tells a different kind of story. Neither a mental puzzle nor a jaded procedural, Nesbø would rather witness what kind of person makes a life wrangling lawbreakers. Who would choose to plug the gap between honest citizens and the criminal subculture? Somebody, ultimately, who belongs to both worlds, and thus to neither.

Harry Hole makes an intriguing character, and the parallel between his personal disintegration and his investigative success is a real eye-opener. Longtime Nesbø readers will welcome this addition to his translated canon. New fans will find this a good place to begin Harry’s story.

Blake Shelton—Country Assassin

Blake Shelton with his wife, Miranda Lambert

Nothing gets a bigger guaranteed reaction from the twenty-somethings working graveyards at the factory than when Blake Shelton’s bombastic “Boys ’Round Here” comes on the radio. Its muscular, bluesy guitar lick and slightly syncopated percussion make for an appealing intro that, while secure in its country roots, has unmistakable crossover appeal. Some workers cheer this track on radio like it’s a live show.

Until Shelton’s voice kicks in with its hip-hop chip-chop studio trickery on “red-red-red-redneck.” This accurately predicts everything that will come after, particularly Shelton’s strange half-spoken country rap that, despite his drawling baritone, resembles nothing so much as Third Eye Blind circa 1997. Perhaps, considering hip-hop’s two decade supremacy in a dwindling music market, Shelton and his creative crew thought twanging up a rap would buy him some cultural relevancy.

Instead, Shelton makes himself—and all radio-friendly country music with him—look desperate. Even before Shelton starts in on his braggadocio-laced lyrics, he’s already proclaimed creative bankruptcy, taking all his cues from modern urban music while proclaiming how he’s “keeping it country.” He wants it both ways: he wants attention from mass audiences, particularly young listeners with disposable income, but he wants to identify with the country niche.

These lyrics celebrate an entirely external view of “country.” He name-checks honky-tonkin’, working the land, country girls, and prayer. Country boys also reject city emblems, like listening to the Beatles and doing the Dougie. But it’s impossible to miss the highlighted, and disgusting, country hallmark: “chew tobacco chew tobacco chew tobacco spit.” Shelton, an avowed non-smoker, has repeatedly used tobacco as a symbol of rural authenticity in his songs.

To hell with taste and character; we spent our money on red Solo cups

The video tragicomically highlights Shelton’s lack of country cred. In simultaneously embracing and rejecting everything urban, we get a jacked truck with bouncy shocks; a barn dance with a DJ spinning twin vinyl; and a squadron of honkies who, apparently, do do the Dougie. But the apotheosis is the farmhouse party with the cow and pig off the porch for girls to pet. Anyone who’s lived near livestock knows you don’t want that smell at a party.

Importantly, Shelton recorded this song after recording the title track for the 2011 Footloose remake, a recording virtually indistinguishable from Kenny Loggins’ original. This track made an explicit confession that country music had become broadly indistinguishable from other pop forms. Only afterward did he feel any need to double down on his perceived country authenticity. Perhaps Shelton realized he’d alienated longstanding country fans like me.

Shelton’s early tracks, like “Some Beach” and “Ol’ Red,” were unmistakably country. I didn’t care for them, but nobody died and made me tastemaker. His masculine but weary growl recalled classic voices like Merle Haggard, and he stuck to common themes of blue-collar life and shared experience that have long motivated country heavyweights. In those terms, his early runaway success makes perfect sense.

But since he’s breathed the rare air of crossover superstardom once reserved for luminaries like Garth Brooks and Hank Junior, Shelton finds himself in an impossible position. He has to maintain his market share—which, as Brooks discovered twenty years ago, means diluting his sound for a broad audience. But he has also gotten increasingly defensive of his country credentials, which he asserts by escalating his weenie-swinging backwoods legitimacy.

Besides “Boys ’Round Here,” Shelton has cut tracks like “Kiss My Country Ass,” which invites anyone who doesn’t share his taste to, well, pucker up. Both songs name-drop Hank Junior’s “Country Boy Can Survive,” though Shelton gives no sign he could skin a buck or run a trotline. He claims, in “KMCA,” that “there's a whole lotta high-class people out there that's lookin' down on me,” so he responds by looking down right back.

Nothing says "Country" like standing barefoot in the river in a $1500 designer dress

It’s hard to determine how much of this chest-thumping bravado belongs to Shelton himself, since he doesn’t write his own songs. But his recent corpus is characterized by counter-elitism, bullying, and swagger. Hank Williams never needed to ballyhoo his country authenticity; neither did Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline. They made music they loved, and anyone who didn’t share that love, was free to leave quietly.

“Boys ’Round Here” isn’t a song. It’s a frontal assault on the idea that different people have different tastes. As music, it’s execrable, pandering to crossover audiences like a drunken Tenderloin panhandler. As a social statement, it contradicts itself, boasting of its country cred while straining to sound as Top-40 as possible. When the novelty wears off, hopefully it will return to the dark hole it came from.