Zain Khalid

FINALIST for the second annual Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction. Winners were announced on her birthday, 21 October, last year, so might be again this year, but no formal announcement of that was made that I found.

The Publisher Says: From the winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize, comes an astonishing debut novel about family, sexuality, and capitalist systems of control, following three adopted brothers who live above a mosque in Staten Island with their imam father

In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and precarious neighborhoods, Coolidge. The three boys are an inseparable if conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Nevertheless, Youssef is keeping a secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting familiar he calls Brother.

The boys’ adoptive father, Imam Salim, is known for his radical sermons, but at home he is often absent, spending long evenings in his study with whiskey-laced coffee, writing letters to his former compatriots back in Saudi Arabia. Like Youssef, he too has secrets, including the cause of his failing health and the truth about what happened to the boys’ parents. When Imam Salim’s path takes him back to Saudi Arabia, the boys will be forced to follow. There they will be captivated by an opulent, almost futuristic world, a linear city that seems to offer a more sustainable modernity than that of the West. But they will have to change if they want to survive in this new world, and the arrival of a creature as powerful as Brother will not go unnoticed.

Stylistically brilliant and intellectually acute, Brother Alive is a remarkable novel of family, capitalism, power, sexuality, and the possibility of reunion for those who are broken.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll start with a quote, though not one from the book:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin in her 2014 National Book Award speech

It seems to me that UKL was thinking of Zain Khalid.

In his debut novel, he takes on a lot...A LOT...of terribly important subjects of immediate world relevance. As a result of this, some storytelling basics don't get their arguably necessary due, eg howinahell does a single Saudi man enter the US and live in New York City with not one soul thinking it odd he's raising kids of wildly disparate ethnic backgrounds? Social services would be involved in these kids' lives in the real NYC.

So, okay, I'm not going to go too hard after that kind of stuff because it's just not that relevant to the author's purpose. Be aware that details like this are left open, and decide if that matters a lot to you. I decided it didn't and moved on to Youssef, Iseul, and Dayo's life with Father. Salim, their radical reformist of a father, is ironically named something that means "correct, free from error, safe, intact, unharmed, unblemished, healthy" while also drinking whisky in his coffee (much against his religion's explicit orders) as he pens famously incendiary sermons on Muslim identity. (See what I mean about Child Protective Services? There'd be a home visit or two.) What makes this more important is that it's Youssef who's narrating this story...his benignly neglected son notices the father's behavior that doesn't quite fit with the mesage. He and his brothers (and Brother, his possibly real/probably imaginary/not quite sure if he's corporeal other, sometimes animal sometimes human self. The boys, like siblings do, just accept the way things are, and move on with growing up and growing apart. Youssef questions the origins of his family but never the reality of it; they, in turn, seem to know about Brother but find their own concerns...who were their parents? Where did their Imam-dad get them?...more compeling and involving than some imaginary friend of their brother's. That same brother who is the one whose non-standard thinking unearths the secrets they've wondered about.

A parent worth his salt would notice this kid's persistent and consistent hallucination and get him some help...not Salim. He's got bigger problems. He wants these boys to be models of what he thinks is right-thinking, morally correct men! While demanding they conform, he models the opposite in his Westernized behaviors, and ignores a sign of burgeoning mental health issues in Youssef. Which is why this section of the story involved me so deeply. I was malignly neglected, while being told I was not who they wanted me to be, by my family (especially my parents) and was re-experiencing the outrage I now feel at their dereliction of duty on these boys' behalf. It kept me fanning the pages for sure.

The action shifts from lower-class Staten Island in post-9/11 world to Salim's story of from whom and why he got these kids. This is interesting, but it's really lightly gone over, and is the set-up for the final section set in The Line, Saudi Arabia's astounding city of the future that they're building with the oceans of money petrochemical exploitation has given them permission to create using slave labor from around the developing world. (This isn't foregrounded, but there's a strong streak of anti-capitalism in Zain Khalid's anti-colonialism. These are very agreeable qualities to me, but note their presence before deciding to make a run at this long, magisterially paced book.) It is in this last section that I lost my sense of the author being in full control of his narrative. A disease process, the shift of Brother from a child's fantasy key to a very different one as Youssef, now a gay young adult, resumes the narrative's reins.

This near-future Paradise is poorly thought out, to me as a long term reader of speculative fiction. The satirical, I suppose, take on the use of state power melded to religious coercion (not the author's words), made me think of so many literary writers' attempts to use genre conventions in not-new, not-fresh ways to make their points. I like ambiguity, and I approve of the author's politics, but I wanted the end section to finish before it did because too many simple snips that could've brought the purpose of the piece into focus weren't made. The result is meandering and unfocused ideas veiled by some fantastical, only-slightly-exaggerated elements. Go big or go home, Author Khalid: It's SF or it's not.

What it was, as a whole read, was beautifully written on a sentence level family saga with a gay undercurrent. It really deserves praise and support because it's hugely ambitious and frankly uninterested in your whiteness. It merits your eyeblinks because it's got a solid core of story that, my crotchets and misgivings aside, is draws the story-hungry reader along.

I'm very glad I read it. I hope you will, too.… (altro)

This is a hamster wheel of a novel - the characters are going around in circles with very little happening. Three step brothers are being raised by an unrelated man in New York. What links them is their mutual Muslim faith. The main character has an imaginary companion (Brother) who is always there. Eventually the three make their way to Saudi Arabia to work on a futuristic city. What they do there is never fully defined. Some will see this book as "art" but I see it as a mishmash of thoughts and ideas.… (altro)

Let me open by noting that before you read this review, you may want to look over the publisher's description of Brother Alive, which can be found here: Brother Alive.

I make this suggestion because Zain Khalid's Brother Alive has a lot going on. A. LOT. What I propose to do here is to discuss the three sections into which the novel is divided with some reflection on prose and plotting, but I won't be providing a summary. The publisher has done a much better job of that than I could.

The novel looks at the lives of three non-biological brothers, born in Saudi Arabia and being raised by a Saudi Imam currently living on Staten Island. It has elements of what may be magical realism—or real and exceptionally uncommon individual experiences. The book's three sections focus on
• The boys' childhood and their relationship with Imam Salim
• Imam Salim's recounting of his life in Saudi Arabia and why he is raising the boys
• A journey the boys take to Saudi Arabia as adults after Imam Salim has returned there.

I found the first section to be the strongest because the characters—even though only one of them is narrating this section—are so clearly portrayed, and even with the not-quite-ordinary elements in this novel I never felt like my willing suspension of disbelief was extended to a breaking point.

When I reached the second section, which is narrated by Imam Salim, I welcomed his voice. I'd seen the questions the boys he's raising had regarding both him and their birth parents, and this section provided responses to those questions and many more. I didn't feel the fondness for him that I felt for the boys, but I don't think the author wanted me to. Imam Salim is a conflicted character who inspires conflicting feelings.

In the final section, we return to the voice of the boy (now man) who narrated the first section. This is where the "rubber band" of my willing suspension of disbelief might snap. Part of the reason for this is that I simply don't know enough about daily life in Saudi Arabia and the different ways in which Islam is/isn't practiced there to be able to separate the accurate from the inaccurate. In Brother Alive, Saudi Arabia depicted in a dystopian manner in some very specific ways. I can easily accept a dystopian view of Saudi Arabia, given its human rights record and the vast disparities in wealth there, but I don't know whether I can accept the particular dystopian version of Saudi Arabia depicted in the final section of Brother Alive.

Brother Alive a a remarkable first novel given the complexity of its plotting and number of characters. If you're a reader who likes a "tidy" narrative, Brother Alive won't work for you. If you're a reader willing to embrace complexity and dissonance, Brother Alive should provide you with some satisfying reading.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.… (altro)