Sons and Other Flammable Objects: A Novel

by Porochista Khakpour

Overview

Compared by Danzy Senna to "the young Philip Roth" for her "lashing, dark humor tinged with deep melancholy," Porochista Khakpour is one of her generation's most outrageously gifted new talents. Sons and Other Flammable Objects is at once a comedy and a tragedy, a family history, and a modern coming-of-age story with a distinctly timeless resonance.

Growing up, Xerxes Adam is painfully aware that he is different—with an understanding of his Iranian heritage that vacillates from typical teenage embarrassment to something so tragic it can barely be spoken. His father, Darius, obsesses over his sense of exile, and fantasizes about a nonexistent daughter he can relate to better than his living son; Xerxes' mother changes her name and tries to make friends; but neither of them can help their son make sense of the terrifying, violent last moments in a homeland he barely remembers. As he grows into manhood and moves to New York, his major goal in life is to completely separate from his parents, but when he meets a beautiful half-Iranian girl on the roof of his building after New York's own terrifying and violent catastrophe strikes, it seems Iran will not let Xerxes go.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802143860
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	09/01/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Porochista Khakpour attended Sarah Lawrence College and the Johns Hopkins UniversityMFA program. Her writing has appeared in The Village Voice, New York, Paper, Nylon, Gear, and Urb, among others.

Table of Contents

Contents

Part One The Birds and the Birds....................1
Part Two Kingdoms....................37
Part Three Heavens....................77
Part Four Hells....................121
Part Five Nights....................161
Part Six The Missing....................213
Part Seven Homelands....................257
Part Eight Arrivals....................291
Part Nine Departures....................329
Part Ten Landings....................359
Acknowledgments....................397

Editorial Reviews

Khakpour explores ethnicity, nationalism, and post-9/11 fear—well-worn themes that are far less compelling than the exuberant originality of her style. The characters burst from the page in fiery exchanges, while their chaotic inner lives are conveyed with witty precision . . . Khakpour’s comic sense of familial tensions—particularly father-son enmity—is infectious.”—The New Yorker

From the Publisher

In outline, the conflicts are familiar: father versus son, assimilation versus cultural allegiance. But Khakpour brings her characters vividly to life; their flaws and feints at intimacy feel poignantly real, and their journeys generate real suspense…Khakpour's biting humor and acute cultural observations carry the book…And though Khakpour's characters are somewhat overburdened with symbolism, they are also imbued with a genuine humanity that wins our affection.
—The New York Times

Judy Budnitz

In this first novel, an Iranian-born young man does all he can to escape his heritage, upbringing and parents, especially his homesick, tyrannical father-and fails, with results sometimes comic and sometimes poignant. Xerxes Adam grows up in a cramped Pasadena apartment. His mother, Lala, makes an effort-always private, on her own terms-to assimilate, but his father, Darius, bewails his exile and resists America wherever he can. Determined to save the complex's blue jays, Darius begins capturing and putting bells on neighbors' cats, which afterward noisily prowl the yard, "clamor against clamor as if their consciences were dialoguing." Soon fellow residents come to complain about this odd foreigner and his inexplicable crusade; Xerxes is embarrassed. When, later, his father confides the origins of his belated animal-rescue instincts (it's his conscience that's causing the tintinnabulation, not the cats'), Xerxes is appalled, and determines to sever ties with his dad, with Iran, with the whole miserable legacy of Middle-Eastern maleness. It is, of course, not so easy . . . and becomes even less so when, on 9/11, he encounters on the rooftop of his New York City apartment the half-Iranian woman who will become his first love. Khakpour's novel is a lively if familiar tale of immigrants caught between incompatible worlds, one past and romanticized, the other present but inaccessible. Khakpour displays a barbed, appealing sensibility and a trenchant wit, and while her book meanders in the middle, and the prose loses verve after the lovely opening, she gets the plot back on track by the end. Agent: Rosalie Siegel/Rosalie Siegel International Literary Agency

Kirkus Reviews