Sins in the City

The structure is similar to a picaresque novel; the main character goes from experience to unrelated experience.  He has conversations with his father who has met and loves Donald Trump.  A new friend tutors him on the arcane knowledge of wealth producing hedge funds.  He discusses Salman Rushdie’s controversial works.  A favorite teacher instructs him on dream interpretation.

From this hodgepodge emerge some sad generalities. Thus “elegies.”  Americans present themselves as Christian, but they are really obsessed with making money and worship the dollar.  Too many Muslims take a literalist view of the Quran and use it to promote things such as child marriage.  Immigrants can’t adjust to a foreign culture they don’t respect.

To write his book, Akhtar experimented with form.  There is no plot, just a collection of events told out of sequence in first person.  Genre is mixed; fact and fiction are jumbled together. I don’t think it worked. The novel was too disjointed and unpleasant to read. To give credit where it is due however, his memoir format was totally convincing, and I was stunned when I realized that much of what I was reading was fiction.

For a twenty first century reader, it is a trite story.  Carrie moves in with her sister and her husband but finds them boring and obsessed with work. She meets a traveling salesman who pays attention to her.  He takes her to dinner, to the theater, buys her things.  Before long the inevitable (to us) happens and she moves in with him.  At his suggestion, she takes a small part in a local play, discovers her talent, and is on the way to fame and fortune.

Sister Carrie is an example of American Realism, popular at the time.  Dreiser has described how things are, not as they should be.  But his readers were scandalized, and the book had a rough reception.  Not only did Carrie succumb to temptation, but she wasn’t punished for it.

The most fun from reading this book was making comparisons with today. The men in the story think they will take advantage of Carrie, but she is the one who finds success and leaves them behind.  Such a view of strong womanhood was too much for the outraged 20^th century audience.  And the 21^st?

Although Carrie moves in with her lover, the word sex is never mentioned.  She is being pursued and the next thing we know they are sharing rooms.  Everything is left to the reader’s imagination. Compare this to Homeland Elegies (above) written two years ago.  The sex scenes are graphic and salacious. Way more information than I need to know.  Can we have something in-between?

Most interesting to me is that the two books written a hundred years apart, one by an atheist and one by a Muslim, share a main subject, the concern about materialism in our country.  Carrie only wants pretty clothes, a lovely apartment, nice things.  At the end when she has them, she is unhappy and lonely.  The drive to acquire and the self-indulgence of the average American are the main criticisms that also arise in Elegies.  Both it and Sister Carrie are concerned about the inequities of economic power. Dreiser, the railroad vs. laborers; Akhtar, Wall Street billionaires vs. laborers.

Decent Guido Brunetti, Commissario of the Venetian police, who both reads and dines well, is always a pleasure to visit. In this novel, he solves the murder of a building inspector, afraid of heights, who has apparently fallen from a scaffold.  At the same time, he struggles with the ethics of asking his wealthy well-connected father-in-law to interfere on his behalf to fix a personal problem with the city.