Starred review from January 18, 2021
Poet and novelist Alyan (Salt Houses) illuminates in this exquisite novel the recent history of Lebanon and Syria through the intimate tragedies and betrayals befalling one family. After Lebanese American heart surgeon Idris Nasr’s father dies, Idris feels compelled to sell the family’s ancestral home in Beirut. His Syrian-born wife, Mazna and their three adult children—Ava, Mimi, and Naj—fear he’s making a mistake, and they gather in Beirut to host a memorial and discuss the sale. All of the children harbor jealousies of various kinds and hide secrets from one another and from their parents, but no secrets are bigger or more potentially devastating than those carried by Mazna, and they gradually emerge in flashbacks of her life before she married Idris. The family conflict plays out over the summer of 2019, and the narrative alternates with scenes from Mazna and Idris’s lives in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and in California during the early years of their marriage. “We don’t choose what we belong to,” Mazna considers near the novel’s end, and in Alyan’s sweeping yet intimate narrative, this thought holds true for the characters’ relationships to family and country alike. Tenderly and compassionately told, and populated with complicated and flawed characters, the Nasrs’ story interrogates nostalgia, memory, and the morality of keeping secrets against the backdrop of a landscape and a people in constant flux. Alyan’s debut was striking, and this one’s even better.
Starred review from March 1, 2021
Alyan's riveting novel, set in America and the Middle East, brims with overlapping memories of secrets, betrayals, and loyalties within a seemingly assimilated Syrian Lebanese American family. In 1978, young Palestinian Zakaria is assassinated in a refugee camp in Beirut, the victim of a factional revenge killing during Lebanon's civil war. Weeks before, Zakaria had betrayed his best friend, Lebanese Idris, with Idris' Syrian girlfriend, Mazna. Spelled out in the first pages, these facts will haunt the novel as their impact on members of the Nasr family comes to light. Cut to present-day California, where cardiac surgeon Idris Nasr lives with Mazna, whom he married not long after Zakaria's death. Their three grown children, born and raised in America, take their parents' perpetually rocky 40-year marriage for granted. And as they first avoid, then succumb to Mazna's entreaties to convene in Beirut--supposedly to hold a memorial service for Idris' recently deceased father but really to protest against Idris' selling the ancestral home he's just inherited--all three are hiding problems from their parents. In Brooklyn, almost 40-year-old microbiologist Ava suspects her WASP husband is having an affair; in Austin, Mimi, 32, has cheated on his long-suffering girlfriend and been dumped by the band he started; almost 30-year-old Naj, an internationally famous singer/musician, has yet to tell her parents she's gay. Meanwhile, Mazna, whose passions for Zakaria and her aborted career as an actress have never died, has spent her marriage betraying and being betrayed by Idris, depending upon yet resenting him. And Idris, a man of privileged self-importance and some charm, is perhaps more self-aware than his family realizes. Palestinian American psychologist and writer Alyan is masterful at clarifying the complicated sociopolitical realities surrounding Lebanon's and Syria's intertwined histories in terms of class, caste, colonialism, and tribalism. But even more masterful here--as in Salt Houses (2017), which portrayed the Palestinian diaspora through four generations of a single family--is her laserlike focus on her multifaceted characters in big and small moments that come together to create a singular family. Painful and joyous, sad and funny--impossible to put down.
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Starred review from February 15, 2021
A dispersed Lebanese-Syrian family gathers in Beirut to halt the sale of their ancestral home, exposing unhealed wounds but also new opportunities for connection. Having escaped the Lebanese Civil War and settled in California, faded actress Mazna and her surgeon husband, Idris, are bickering their way into old age when a transplanted heart whispers to Idris that it's time to sell the crumbling family estate. Their grown children sense the gravity of the moment and oppose the sale but are preoccupied by their own problems. Ava in Park Slope suspects her husband of infidelity, Mimi in Austin can't get his music career off the ground, and Naj, still in Lebanon, parties listlessly and longs for forbidden fruit. The family's reluctant reunion underscores the distance between its members but also the persistence of the centripetal forces pulling them together. Interspersing scenes from Mazna's youth among present-day moments of chaos and conflict, Alyan (Salt Houses, 2017) points to patterns of secrecy and shame and the power of buried trauma to leap beyond displacement and time. Acute psychological insight and a sense of Beirut as a fluid, evolving entity further amplify the power of this moving family drama.
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