09 Jun / Brother Alive by Zain Khalid [in Booklist]
Three boys – Youssef, Iseul, Dayo – are born in Saudi Arabia in 1990. Their distant fathers – from Pakistan, Korea, Nigeria – are Muslim students at the University of Markab, where they meet Salim, who will become the boys’ adoptive father. Salim flees Saudi Arabia with the infants, raising them on the top floor of Staten Island’s Occident Street Mosque, where he’s known simply as Iman Salim.
The boys’ upbringing is haphazard at best. “I have no interest in being your father,” Salim states, but at least they always have each other. When Salim returns to Saudi Arabia almost 20 years later, the boys eventually follow to the land of their provenance.
Confronting religious intolerance, homophobia, capitalist greed, and bioweapons, Zain Khalid presents a debut novel in five parts with an epistolary reveal; four are Youssef’s letters to his niece Ruhi, one is the boys’ origin story via Salim, and the final chapter belongs to the titular, otherworldly Brother. Riotous with erudition, including phrases like “his Lacanian understanding of symbolic corporate structures,” Khalid’s multilayered, nonlinear narrative turns unwieldy and ultimately disappointing as an exercise in sly cleverness rather than rewarding storytelling.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist Online, May 20, 2022
Readers: Adult
Published: 2022