Published earlier this year, this is Sanam Mahloudji's debut novel. The narrative follows the lives of five Iranian women, from three different generations of the same family. The matriarch, Elizabeth, is narrated in the third-person; the other four women (including the one who's already dead) tell their own stories. This kind of format lends itself to listening, and the audio-version, voiced by Mozhan Navabi, Lanna Joffrey, Nikki Massoud, and Donia Bijan, is indeed very effective.

I first heard of The Persians when it was shortlisted for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction (previously won by books like On Beauty by Zadie Smith, The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver).

Then it came up again as a contender for a comic fiction prize -- one of a shortlist of eight books that made the judges "laugh out loud".

Well, I need a bit of that, I thought.

And, OK, that angle was my first disappointment. The dialogue is very funny in parts. But the characters are too annoying, the pace is often too draggy, and the overall scenario is just too sad for this to really qualify as a comic novel.



Let me unpack (in a spoiler-laden rest-of-post)...

1. The characters

I've mentioned Elizabeth. An artist who was never really able to develop her talent in 1940s Iran, she stayed on in her homeland after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, while her daughters (Shirin and Seema) left for the United States.

Her granddaughter Niaz (Shirin's daughter) stayed on too. Niaz is in some ways the most interesting character. She rebels against the new regulations the Revolution brings in, and her career is a fascinating glimpse into the underground counter-culture in those early years of the Islamic Republic. She's playing with fire, though, and at one point has to be rescued from jail by Elizabeth's deft use of persuasion and bribery. After that point, we don't gain much of a sense of life in modern-day Iran.

Mahloudji was born in Tehran, but her family left when the Shah fell. As she says about Shirin in an interview with Mandana Chaffa: "Even if on the surface maybe she has a freer life in Houston than she would have in Tehran, I do wonder what Shirin would have been like if she had stayed. I think she might be a happier person, and probably less focused on outer success and riches. Maybe she really would have had a better life if she had just stayed and dealt with life within the Islamic Republic -- at least she still would have been home... Who would I be if my parents never left? There is a part of me that grieves that person that could have been. Who would she be?" The unknowable answer to that question perhaps accounts for the slightly blurry life of Niaz.

Seema and Shirin both thought their stint in the US would be brief, and the Revolution soon over. They both struggled in their new country, as exiles do. It wasn't only that they were uprooted from their home and culture; it was also that they'd come from a very prominent Iranian family, the Valiats, and had to adjust to the fact that such a lineage counted for absolutely nothing in America. As one character puts it, they didn't come looking for a better life; they LEFT a better life.

Seema's husband is supportive of her career right up until the time they have children, when she's expected to settle down as the homemaker; a couple of years before the story opens (in the earlyish-2000s) Seema succumbs to cancer, and muses from beyond the grave on her unfulfilled ambitions. She recalls her awful feeling of isolation as a newcomer in the US.


All the photos were taken in Tehran, 2000

Shirin, meanwhile, is a riotously self-dramatizing event-planner (an appropriate career, since her every appearance is an event in itself). We first meet her when her niece (Seema's daughter Bita) is bailing her out of jail, after she has been arrested for soliciting in a Colorado nightclub. It's not very fair. The guy who invites her to be his "Cleopatra for the night" -- for which she tauntingly suggests a price of "fifty Gs" -- turns out to be a policeman. The racist overtones are obvious, and could have constituted a defence. But Shirin -- undeterred by suggestions she might even lose her Green Card, and be deported to Iran -- absolutely refuses to help herself. Despite Bita's aid, and despite the counsel of Patty, Bita's lawyer girlfriend, Shirin is in self-destruct mode, laying into all and sundry, flinging money away (literally), and generally acting as an entitled and totally insensitive bitch.

She is NOT likeable. And I say that having just read a very interesting piece by Ellen Scherr about the hormonal changes that reportedly cause women to lose some of their drive to please and nurture others as they age, and to become "literally less neurologically invested in what others think". Even taking that into consideration, you don't feel tempted to cut Shirin any slack. While we understand that separation from her homeland and her privileged life has caused scars, we're also pretty convinced that she's been like this all her life... And it's not that I'm trying to put a noisy woman in her box. If a man behaved like this, I'd be appalled in just the same way.

Shirin has a kind of epiphany at the end of the book, when she realizes that all this acting up masks a desire to be loved. But it's too little too late (and, frankly, too contrived).

As the story progresses, secrets emerge. Bit by bit we learn about Elizabeth's youthful infatuation with the family chauffeur's son, Ali. Such a cross-class liaison would have been highly reprehensible in those days, and she chooses the path of prudence by marrying someone of her own caste. But when her husband turns out to be incapable of fathering children, she restarts a covert relationship with Ali (now doing very well for himself). So one of the big revelations of the novel is that Seema's and Shirin's father (and Bita's grandfather) is not who they thought he was... Ali ends up in the US too, and when his wife dies, all these hidden things come tumbling out, and he and Elizabeth (now in their eighties) rekindle their relationship when she visits.

We've also discovered that Valiat heritage isn't all it's cracked up to be either. The great hero of the past is not without bloodstained hands, and the inherited riches have a dubious provenance.



Which brings us to Bita... Cut off from her Persian heritage, she has grown up betwixt and between, conforming neither to Iranian nor American expectations. Horrified that the possession of riches seems to have stopped her family actually growing up as human beings (her Aunt Shirin's example being only the latest of many), she starts to give her fortune away (having already jettisoned her law studies).

I'm not sure if we're meant to applaud these gestures. I just found her naivete a bit irritating. You can do this kind of thing only if you're incredibly privileged... In fact, the attitude to money throughout was irritating. Given that I wasn't bothered by the conspicuous riches displayed in China Rich Girlfriend (Kevin Kwan), and River East, River West (Aube Rey Lescure), and The Secret History (Donna Tartt), and even The Line of Beauty (Alan Hollinghurst), I'm not totally sure why I found the Valiat wealth so offputting. I think it's because it constituted another stereotype, and The Persians rather abounded in those. As Pranavi Sharma comments: "The book wants to be several things at once. What the novel does not quite do, however, is push its characters beyond their archetypes. The rebellious exile, the sorrowful grandmother, the privileged American daughter, all remain somewhat attached to their assigned roles."

2. The pace

There was something a tad uneven here. I would have preferred a little less on Elizabeth's adolescence and Niaz's partying period, and a little more on their day-to-day lives in the Islamic Republic after that initial period. I would also -- this is probably heresy -- have liked a bit less of Shirin's shenanigans...


Tourists visiting Iran

3. The scenario -- hits and misses

The Persians offers an interesting take on female familial relationships, in that each of the women depicted in The Persians is somehow let down by a woman in her past (Elizabeth by the siblings who made fun of her big nose, and by the relative whose suicide she discovers; Seema and Shirin by Elizabeth, who "didn't want to be a mother"; Niaz by Shirin, who left her behind in Iran, and by Elizabeth, who misrepresents Shirin's views to Niaz, and manipulates her into staying; and Bita by Seema, who dies, and by Shirin, who utterly exploits her goodwill and family feeling).

I found the portrayal of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran very interesting (insofar as the latter went). And the subject of migrant identity is always one that resonates with me. (But I wasn't moved by this book in the way I was by Kaveh Akbar's Martyr!)

Humour often sits very close to trauma, but in this case, I found that the pain of the book (displacement, alienation, misunderstanding, and rejection) swamped the would-be funny scenes (which were in any case dominated by the egregious Shirin).

I was very struck by this perceptive critique by Rosa Rahimi, which is worth quoting at some length:

"I am wary of this fixation on an Iranian homeland and portrayals of diaspora, which fix themselves to the experiences of the elite. Particularly those who long for an Iran where they had money, power, and prestige, and look upon it with nostalgia. I think most would admit this is also an Iran that no longer exists. Reading the book, I found myself returning to Hamid Dabashi’s Iran Without Borders, where the scholar harshly -- maybe justifiably -- calls out 'abused terms such as "exile" and "diaspora" [that] have now emerged as the coded master terms of bourgeois nostalgia.'

"Yes, there is a universal tragedy inherent to the condition of exile... But to get to the heart of anyone’s feelings, we need characters who feel fully formed, whom we can like, empathise with, understand, feel surprised by, or at least understand on a meaningful level. Flitting through five narratives leaves the characters sounding similar at times, with only the perspective changed to match the archetype they bring to the table...

"The narratives work best when Mahloudji delves deep into the inner lives of these women, rather than lamenting how good they had it in Iran and how oxymoronic it is to think of refugees with more money than Americans."

***

So, I'm on the fence about this one. But again I'm in the minority, I think. The reviews I've read have mostly been positive. Joanna Cannon is fairly typical: "It is as funny as it is moving, as perceptive as it is pithy."

Ah well, you can't love 'em all...