Identity Crises
Under the Covers with Justin Bauer
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Boualem Sansal has a curious take on modern Arab identity. In his The German Mujahid(Europa, Sept. 29), he goes to great lengths to hammer home a single point: that Nazism and Islamist extremism are equivalent, even identical. At the root of the novel's argument are the hyperliteral, hyperspecific embodiments of his thesis — two brothers, sons of an Algerian mother and a former SS officer, struggling in the banlieues of Paris.
Rawi Hage's notion of identity is no less idiosyncratic. In Cockroach (Norton, Oct. 12), his titular character compensates for his violent Middle Eastern past with fantasy, transforming at will from human to insect in Montreal's immigrant demimonde. Where Sansal is specific, eager to overdefine his characters and his arguments, Hage is evasive and imprecise — the cockroach might be superhuman, or his author may be a magical realist. Either way, the strain of the past and the struggles of immigration possess the power to turn a man into a bug.
What these two immigrant Arab novels have in common, despite their enormous aesthetic, cultural and political differences, are equally contrived strategies to define identity. Sansal works so hard to drive home parallels between Reich and jihad through his characters that he sacrifices their potential for universality. Hage's antihero defines himself with echoes of Burroughs and Kafka. Each of these outsized identities is born out of historical violence, created in flight from it, and ultimately results in misery and suicide.
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Scholars will tell you that the novel is a modern invention, born out of a new Enlightenment notion of the self as separate from society and worthy of prolonged examination. With a qualification here or a cavil there, they will explain that the issue of identity is hardwired into the form.
And the majority of novels, excluding the very experimental or the very French, confront it. Identities are crafted or grown into, like Huck Finn on the river. They're asserted, like Holden Caulfield's and Alexander Portnoy's. Or they're discovered, by Dickensian orphans, private dicks or secret agents. Outside of fiction, in other, more lucrative sectors of the culture, identity provides the most common currency, whether in literary memoirs, celebrity tell-alls or personal blogs. The notion that the individual deserves scrutiny isn't just a given, but a therapeutic imperative.
Take Patsy MacLemoore, the heroine of Michelle Huneven's engrossing, languid, slow-building Blame (Sarah Crichton, Sept. 1). A blackout drunk, Patsy starts her story in a jail cell, unable to remember driving over the Jehovah's Witnesses stationed in her driveway with a stack of Watchtowers. Like Sansal or Hage, Huneven takes on large issues, but through Patsy shows a character exerting herself against the cards she's been dealt. For the bulk of the novel, Patsy makes her way from prison, through recovery and AA, and builds herself a life that acknowledges her guilt without letting it destroy her.
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Huneven does this beautifully. Her attention to surfaces, and to small movements of character and conversation, puts her in line with a minimalist Kmart realism; the care and richness of Patsy's reclamation only gives the story's final turn, regrettably spoiled by the jacket copy, more impact.
This moment, where Patsy's carefully crafted post-crash identity is suddenly and completely evacuated of meaning, is a radical departure; it pushes the discovery and detective work of a plot into existential uncertainty.
This final break merely provides the starting point for Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply (Ballantine, Aug. 25). Chaon's characters — three sets of them, in three independent, loosely linked storylines — each willingly shuck off the lives they've been given. They get into their cars and set off to create entirely new selves, in the barrenness of the Michigan backwoods or an abandoned Great Plains motel or trekking through the Canadian tundra.
On one hand, Chaon's bleak, thrilling high-wire stories celebrate the freedom of losing yourself, even as this lack of stability opens up his narrative to weirdness and terror. But in showing the ease with which his characters cast off one identity and assume another, Chaon questions the basic existence of a single identity.
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But even after the intellectual heavy lifting has been done, there are small points in the book — where one character takes his lover's hand, and the lover is unsure whether it's a gesture of affection or possession, or even of which person, which identity, sits beside her — where the creepy, insinuating effect of what Chaon has done shows clearest. It's enough to make you think — even though Sansal and Hage draw a world where the sins of the fathers invariably are visited upon their sons — of that kind of solidity as comforting.
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