Homeland Elegies: A Novel by Ayad Akhtar

Homeland Elegies was a revelation, a chance to see American culture and history and politics from the viewpoint of an 'outsider,' even if that outsider was American born.

Ayad Akhtar  has written a novel with a strong narrative voice that reads like memoir. It's compelling storyline and conflicted characters engage the reader. It is also a novel of ideas, a dissection of social and political culture.

How Christian is America? Consider the commercialization of Christian holy days, the Christian based place names of cities, the King James Bible language and words that are woven in our writing and speech, how we do personal hygiene, dogs in every home. 

The accumulation of wealth, buying sprees dependent on credit cards and interest, and the importance of corporate wealth and the power it wields is another theme. It's a Wonderful Life, that beloved Christmas movie, the narrator realizes, was really about money and power.

Central to the novel is the experience of living in a racist culture, especially after 9-11. When the narrator's car breaks down in rural Pennsylvania, the narrator finds himself vulnerable.

The narrator travels to Pakistan to visit family. Is returning to one's family homeland the answer? The anger that fuels people here is also found abroad. 

"America is my home," the narrator affirms. 

Homeland Elegies, this poem that mourns the country of our hopes and dreams, reveals our character like a mirror. It isn't pretty. 

I was given access to a free galley by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. I received a final copy of the novel from a giveaway through Bookreporter.com.

Homeland Elegies: A Novel
by Ayad Akhtar
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date: September 15, 2020   
ISBN: 9780316496438
hardcover $14.99 (USD)

from the publisher

A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one -- least of all himself -- in the process.