The Arsonists' City
The Arsonists’ City is a fine entry in the modern literary genre of “I’m an immigrant and my mother is CRAZY”. The Nasr family are 60ish mom Mazna and dad Idris, and three kids Ava, Mimi, and Naj. The grandfather has died, and Idris has decided to sell the family home back in Beirut, which for complex reasons requires that the family reunite, with all of their old fights, tensions, and unresolved secrets.
All of them are carrying something. We start with Ava, the eldest daughter, a microbiologist who lives in New York with her husband Nate (scion of an old WASP family) and their two kids. Ava suspects Nate is having an affair with a coworker, and reluctantly goes along under arm-twisting from her mother.
Mimi, second child and son, lives in Austin, where he works in a restaurant and plays guitar in a band that isn’t really going anywhere. He’s drifting in a relationship with his longterm girlfriend Harper, an ordinary midwesterner who works at a record label. Mimi won’t accept help from anyone, but doesn’t have the energy to kick himself out of his rut.
Naj, the youngest, is a successful musician in Beirut. She’s a pop-violinist (I’m feeling Lindsey Stirling) who writes incredibly sexy songs popular in the Middle East and Europe. Her life is a whirlwind of shows, art happenings, drinking and drugs in the Beirut party scene. She’s also a closeted lesbian whose series of self-destructive one-night stands is interrupted when The Ex arrives, a refugee from the Syrian Civil War.
Having met the kids, we go back in time to the late 70s and meet the parents, mostly through Mazna’s eyes as she grows up in Damascus and discovers a talent as an actress. Through her director, Mazna meets Idris, a young doctor who lives in Beirut, and his Palestinian refugee friend Zakaria. She dates Idris but loves Zakaria. Their summer ends when Zakaria is murdered, another casualty of the ongoing violence of the region. She marries Idris, they move to Blythe, have kids, and drift through a long war of marriage against each other.
The writing is elegant, but all of these people are so cramped by their secrets, by the channels of gossip within the family, the shifting alliances, the layers of constant betrayals. It takes a long time to discover the root betrayals, and they’re pretty explosive. Ava isn’t Idris’ child, she’s Zakaria’s. Mazna never said anything, but Idris knows (he can do math, recognize a face), but also Idris has found a peace because he holds himself responsible for Zakaria’s death, for throwing his friend out of his house and back into the camps where he was assassinated. Idris’ sister Sara tattled on Mazna and Zakaria to Idris, and she blames herself as well. Not that Idris is blameless; Mazna had exactly one successful audition in Hollywood, and he lied and told her she hadn’t gotten the role, and told the director she’d gone back to Syria.
The kids find some kind of accommodation with each other, with the tension in their lives, and a future less fraught. There are a lot of big feelings in this book, some decent observation on divided heritages and cultures, and a great sense of Beirut as a place. I’m not sure how deep it is, but I had a good time, even if I was chewing my fingernails with tension at all of these silly people who can’t communicate honestly.