Home Boy might have the dubious honour of being the most patronizing Pakistani book I’ve
read yet. Even though I’ve read quite a few Pakistani fiction novels with
horribly misinformed intentions, Home
Boy takes the cake for its utterly pompous tone. But let me start at the
beginning.
Here’s the first line of the blurb: “They are renaissance
men. They are boulevardiers.”
Now take that sentence, add at least eleven more SAT words
to it, and repeat ad nauseam. You have the entire book. It’s the equivalent of
the most pretentious sentence you have ever read, expanded into a whole novel. A 216-page long exercise in pure, flamboyant
torture. I read it in the slowest way possible; I took water-drinking gaps,
random-internet-surfing gaps, fanfiction-reading gaps. I left the book rotting
on my table while I celebrated Eid, two farewell events, three wedding
functions and six post-wedding parties, hoping that when I’d come back the book
would have magically transformed into something interesting. No go. All I had
at the end of the three-week-long wasted time was a deep, dark desire to throw
the book into a hole from which it would never return.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
The characters:
Though we shared a common
denominator and were told half-jokingly, Oh, all you Pakistanis are alike, we weren’t the same, AC, Jimbo and me.
Chuck, AC and Jimbo are three Pakistani boys lost in the
revelry of their New York City lives around the time of the change of the millennium.
It takes no time at all for a rain of adjectives to descend upon the reader’s
head when we meet these characters. Show and don’t tell? Pfft, this book is too
high-and-mighty for such tactics. This
book would rather prefer to tell you, dear not-very-intelligent reader, in as
condescending a manner as possible, exactly what these characters are like,
so as not to tax your tiny little brain into trying to figure them out
yourself. There is no second-guessing here, no fine layers to peel away. These characters are caricatures of the
idea of having complex characters; attempts at originality that fall flat.
AC – a cryptonym,
short in part for Ali Chaudhry – was a charming rogue, an intellectual dandy, a
man of theatrical presence. Striding into a room sporting his signature
pencil-thin moustache, one-button velour smoking jacket, and ankle high
rattlesnake-skins, he demanded attention, an audience.
AC, according to the blurb, is a gangsta rap-spouting
academic. Let me stop you right there for now. A ‘rap-spouting academic’? It’s
like someone had a deck of characteristics and thought, "Hmm, how shall I make
my characters interesting? I want
them to be likeable, but also, 3d! I
know! I shall throw in the two most conflicting characteristics!" *shuffles
cards* "Aha! An academic who raps! Never been done before. I shall use this.
Next character."
It is the most cringe-worthy attempt at creating a 3 dimensional character ever. The amateur
equivalent of making teenagers spout classic literature and love old music in
order to make them ‘different’ and ‘fiesty’. AC does not inspire any affection
in the reader, and the same goes for Chuck,
a lost, unrelatable character with no admirable traits and a distinct lack of
narrative drive. What does Chuck want?
Why should I be concerned about him? Why am I reading a 216-page book about
Chuck’s life? Who the hell knows?! The blurb itself claims that
Chuck is a ‘wide-eyed, off-the-boat kid, searching for himself and the American
Dream.’ I think I rolled my eyes so hard
I gave myself a headache. Chuck is quite possibly the most uninspiring
protagonist ever. I did not root for him, did not care for him, and found
myself having no reaction to either his successes or failures.
Later, when reviewing
the episode in my mind, I recalled things to say, funny things, bold things,
things men say to woo women, but just then I stood there dumbly, my hands flopping
at my side. It was as if my reservoir of cool had run dry. It was time to
leave.
The third character is Jimbo, another one off of the
automatic story generator algorithm, a
card-shuffled character with daddy issues and no concrete storyline to follow.
He is dating a girl his father doesn’t approve of; he has a good-looking sister crushing on his best friend Chuck; he is a physically dominating
man with a sappy side story and a moralistic streak. Again, do we learn to care about him? Do we root for his relationship or for
his dad to become more accepting? Do we admire his deejaying abilities or hope
for a better future for him? Nope. Non. Nyet. Nhi.
The Summary:
The backdrop is 9/11, and our three valiant heroes are, in
the months following the attack on the Trade Towers, setting off to find a
missing friend. Although 'friend' might be stretching it a bit. The Shaman is a random, pointless character
whose only worth is in being missing, so that the three musketeers can go
off searching for him in another city, spend the night drunk at his house and
end up getting arrested for ‘terrorist activities’. The story is not so much
about the journey to save a friend’s life, as one would assume from the panic
caused after 9/11-
After 9/11 we heard
not only from family and friends but from distant relatives, colleagues,
ex-colleagues, one-night stands, two-night stands, neighbours, childhood
friends, and acquaintances, and in turn we made our own inquiries, phone calls,
dispatched e-mails.
-but more about Chuck, and the first time Chuck drove a car,
and the time when Chuck got fired, and that other time when he became a cab
driver, and oh of course the one time he got scared in New York and randomly
called up one of his mother’s old friends whom he didn’t really know. Chuck Chucky Chuck Chuck and his opinions
on anything and everything. And then Chuck goes home at the end, presumably
more lost and confused than he was at the beginning. The end.
The good:
Sometimes, very rarely, the book manages to surprise. In the
midst of the posturing and the heavy-handed self-importance, sentences of worth and value crop up
suddenly, as if these were the first, few sparks of inspiration which led
to the mundane text-wrapping around them.
I was broken,
depleted, more cipher than actor, but kept thinking don’t trip, don’t break
a leg, walk with your head up high, like you’ve done nothing wrong, but couldn’t, and it didn’t really matter,
because no matter what I did, I couldn’t change the way I was perceived.
The book also manages to introduce interesting characters
accidentally, as if they are the products of an imagination which hasn’t been
carefully manipulated to become boring, as is the case with AC, Chuck and Jimbo. In this case
the interesting character is Jimbo’s father – Old Man Khan – who doesn’t think modern
women should cook, has a cool love story, and says funny things without meaning
to.
“You mean you won’t cry
over spilled milk?” Amo interjected. Old Man Khan looked at her quizzically. “Why
would I cry about the spilling of the milk?”
Or Chuck’s mother: a feisty, opinionated widow with a temper
and a soft heart. Chuck’s mother, lovingly called Ma, could very well have been
the saving grace of this book, had she not had the misfortune of being in
another country and thus not featuring in the events as much as one would hope.
It was a real scene,
and in the headlights Ma cut a pose like a fifties’ film actress with her long
black hair tied up in a bun, her sari wrapped tightly around her hips, and her
kohl-lined eyes flashing, but she was no damsel in distress: with one fist on
her waist, she wagged a finger at the man, who, not knowing what hit him, didn’t
get a word in edgewise.
Another saving grace is the familiarity with New York, the
setting of the book. Given that the majority of the book is set in the city,
the reader is welcomed to the home that New York becomes for Chuck and his
friends.
You could spend ten
years in Britain and not feel British, but after spending ten months in New
York, you were a New Yorker, an original settler, and in no time you would be
zipping uptown, downtown, crosstown, wherever, strutting, jaywalking,
dispensing directions to tourists like a mandarin. “You see,” you’d say, “it’s
quite simple: the city’s like a grid.”
The book is a love letter to New York, and might be of some
interest to whoever has lived in that city. It waxes poetic about the streets, the hangout places, the parks and
museums. Chuck, an immigrant on a student visa from Pakistan, has left his
mother behind and goes from haunting lonely places in New York to finding the
places and people among whom he fits.
Sure, independence has
its dark dimensions, its lonely frequented loci, like a scarred green bench in
the northwest corner of Washington Square where no one sought you out. You
would turn your collar up then, and sit with your arms folded regarding the
masquerade ... New York could be a lonely place, but over the course of a year,
these places became fewer and farther between.
The bad:
Don’t ask me, I
thought. I don’t know nothing. AC was
the go-to guy for advice and instruction. I was a village idiot.
The worst thing about the book is the fact that it is
written about, and from the point of view of, probably the most boring narrator ever. Chuck inspires no warmth or
affection, no feelings of understanding, no desire to care or relate on any
level. He is like the epitome of the self-obsessed male, a personification of the privileged
straight young man whose world begins and ends with his opinion and the
sound of his loud, loud voice drowning everyone else out.
Since I had no
particular calling, having majored in lit, a discipline in which, I learned,
anything goes, I did what I had to do: after dispatching some resumes on thick
paper and making some phone calls, I secured interviews and then a job at a big
bank that had just become bigger.
Oh ho hum, I don't care. It is the banality of the book that kills me. There is a degree of
unremarkability (not a word, but I’m using this to honour the book’s ‘Let’s use
big big words to impress people’ pretentiousness) about the whole proceedings
that left me alternatively yawning or raising my eyes to the heavens in the
hope that Allah would strike this book with a lightning bolt so I
could stop reading it.
It’s like that one guy we all know who tries too hard to be
smart and comes off as smarmy, or arrogant, or just plain irritating. Chuck
wants to do this, or do that, but WHY?
What motivates him? We have no idea. This book believes in the ‘tell, don’t
show’ aspect of storytelling very faithfully; an aspect that fails spectacularly at managing to create
any connection between the reader and the protagonist.
At the time we didn’t
think that there was more to it than the mere sense of spectacle. We were
content in celebrating ourselves and our city with libation. It was later that
we realized that we’d been on common ground then, on terra firma. Later we also
realized that we hadn’t been putting on some sort of show for others, for
somebody else. No, we were protagonists in a narrative that required coherence
for our own selfish motivations and exigencies.
And oh my god the words, the WORDS. Did I mention the complete-thesaurus regurgitation going on here? The
characters don’t just speak out in protest, they fulminate. They don’t think,
they ruminate. Conversing with Jimbo requires ‘hermeneutic feats’, AC delivers ‘some
sort of disquisition’, and Chuck enters murky bathrooms to get high ‘tout seul’.
By the third page, I had already looked up nine words in the dictionary. And
this coming from the person who is the stand-in, walking talking reference book for
the rest of her family. Who is this book written for? Those who read
dictionaries in their free time?
The sudden random references to Karachi places (Burns Road)
or desi terms (chappati) are also jarring; the equivalent of an expatriate
hurriedly and awkwardly using Urdu works among formal elders to reassure that
they haven’t lost their desi roots. This book is the guy who flicks through a
travel brochure to pick out the local-sounding names and throws them
haphazardly together. It’s not familiar.
It’s not comforting. You want to patronizingly pat the character’s head,
while at the same time wincing because he has committed the social faux pas of
pretending to know more Urdu than he actually does.
The recommendation:
Recommended for people who have travelled to New York/are
studying for their GREs/wish to balance out the awesome books they’re reading
with some mindless drivel. Maybe. Read
at your own discretion. This reviewer takes no responsibility for the
feeling of distaste or boredom that will eventually creep in.