The Barnes & Noble Review
A central conundrum of our constantly connected moment is the crisis of empathy: we are witness to incredible suffering and yet often unmoved by it, especially in comparison to the anguish we feel over events of far smaller scale. We mull over this inequity every now and then — when the inequities present themselves in some glaring fashion, as when five deaths in France garner greater concern than five hundred in Baghdad. More often than not we skirt the issue, never quite perusing the cruel alchemy of distance and detachment and the cool and nefarious dehumanization that is born of it, never quite understanding why we cannot mourn certain deaths or distant misfortunes.
It is this very question of who can be mourned, and what losses feel proximate and poignant, that lies at the core of Omar El Akkad's novel American War. The book, set in a dystopian future America, where fossil fuels are banned and bits of the continent have fallen into the ocean, is proof of the premise that while philosophy can urge contemplation, it is fiction that can lure us into compassion. Akkad, who has in his career as a journalist covered the surfeit of conflicts that make up our bloodied present, does this via a grand and panoramic inversion. The jumbled jargon of war that contemporary Americans attach to other lands — the ones that produce refugees, endure the buzz and blasts of surveilling drones, and try to preserve their children from recruitment as suicide bombers — are in this deftly constructed novel-scape the realities of a future America. Splintered by a second Civil War, this America is divided between the Blues of the North, who have claimed Columbus, Ohio as their capital, and the Southern Rebels, who have chosen secession instead of abiding by the ban on fossil fuels. The war between these jaggedly ripped halves of America begins in 2074 and continues until 2095.
At the center of American War is a woman, the fighting half of a pair of twin girls whose father is murdered when he tries to get a permit to migrate to the safer Blue North. The twins, Dana and Sarat, their brother, Simon, and their mother, Martina, are all refugees, vying for space on a bus with others who have lost children and homes and lives to "the Birds," unmanned drones that rain down death on the territories controlled by the Southern Rebels. Their place of refuge is Camp Patience, a sprawling complex where the forlorn eke out an existence: lines of tents ringed by a river of excrement "which produces a stench so overwhelming that the refugees refused to live in any tent within fifty feet."
The camp's name is freighted with meaning transported from our world: "Patience" is the English translation of the Arabic Sabr, which in turn lends its name to the Beirut neighborhood and the adjacent refugee camps Sabra and Shatila — the site of a grotesque massacre of Palestinians in the 1980s and the venue of ongoing conflict. Here again are the cruel contours of faraway lands affixed to an American landscape; it is Sarat's sister, Dana, a beautiful child who becomes the subject of photographs taken by journalists who come to see "refugee children" and "will pay all kinds of money to film themselves a pretty little Southern refugee girl." Sarat's brother, Simon, runs off to fight, while their mother worries about the children she is raising in and amid such hopelessness. The young Sarat runs around with a ragtag team of misfits, her daredevil energy leading her to jump into the excrement-filled moat on a dare. Not long after, she becomes the target of a recruiter for the Southern Rebels who wheedles her with books and (literally) honey sandwiches, both delicacies amid the deprivations of the camp. As in the actual Sabra and Shatila, there is a massacre, and not all of Sarat's family survives.
The world of American War is a prophetic one, with loss and privation and conflict the cornerstones. It is also a compelling one, the warp and weft of its details constructing a universe whose internal logic is as convincing as any real- world account. All of it can be chalked up to Akkad's mastery of detail, his depiction of an ecological collapse hastening the end of human compassion, filial feeling, normalcy, beauty, and possibility. The wry narrator of American War guides the reader through this devastated world; excerpts from bits and pieces of official documentation add depth, exposing piecemeal how bureaucracies paper over the bleeding actualities of war. As he tells us, "This is not a story about war. It is about ruin."
Also included are excerpts from the "memoirs" of survivors and fighters. The eerily titled "Neither Breathe Nor Hope: The Untold Story of the South Carolina Wartime Quarantine" tells of a traitorous virologist responsible for the poisoning of an entire state. "A Northern Soldier's Education in War and Peace: The Memoirs of General Joseph Wieland Jr." presents the contentions of a man who wants Southerners to be compensated for "Un-Oriented Drone Damage." The compensation is not given, but Wieland, as it happens, meets his death at the hands of Sarat, who has grown up to become an assassin for the Southern cause. The thematic inversion continues when we learn that the activities of the rebels are funded by the Bouazizi Empire, which controls from afar the happenings of a broken America. It is they and "the anonymous benefactors across the ocean in China" that insist on sending blankets to the camp, unconcerned with the fact that it's the last thing the residents need. Martina Chestnut confesses that she cannot "imagine these benefactors as people." For her and other refugees, they "exist in another universe, not as beings of flesh and blood but as pipes in a vast indecipherable machine."
The challenge of a dystopian novel is to imagine that what we all feel is imminent but cannot, for want of imagination or articulation, envision as a whole. American War meets this mark and reaches further. The depletions being inflicted on the environment by fossil fuels, the sinking of coastal lands, the ascendance of a singular fervor for exclusion and intolerance, the killing of unknown others by remote control and known others by torture and targeting are all realities of our world that we have somehow accepted. It is the costly consequences of this acceptance projected into a distinctly American future that Akkad lays out for us in the novel-scape. If Butler, the philosopher, wished us to pause and balk at our crisis of empathy, consider the moral cost of not grieving for those whose lives remain too remote from our own, Akkad inverts and presents us with faraway sufferings now imposed on familiar faces, known geographies, resonant names.
There are no answers in war, and none therefore in American War. Killing a man, even a powerful one like General Wieland, does not grant Sarat reprieve from her demons or from all she has lost. War, American or otherwise, provides only this certainty: violence is premised first as an antidote to destruction, then as a temporary salve, and ultimately as a justification for itself. It is only in recognizing its circuitous truths that a possibility for reprieve can be conjured, a possibility that must necessarily be erected on the more fragile of human impulses. In American War, the battle- hardened, prison-leavened Sarat ceases to mourn, and it is this world, a world without grief, that American War exhorts us to urgently beware. It's a species of fear we could do with more of right now.
Rafia Zakaria is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (Beacon 2015), which was named one of Newsweek’s Top 10 nonfiction books of 2015. She is a regular columnist for Dawn Pakistan and writes the "Reading Other Women" Series at The Boston Review. Her work has appeared in Guardian Books, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, Al Jazeera America, Dissent, Guernica, and various other venues.
Reviewer: Rafia Zakaria
The New York Times Book Review - Justin Cronin
The novel may be set in the future, and the title may be American War, but there's nothing especially futuristic or, for that matter, distinctly American about it. This is precisely the author's point…America is not Iraq or Syria, but it's not Denmark, either; it's a large, messy, diverse country glued together by 250-year-old paperwork composed by yeoman farmers, and our citizens seem to understand one another less by the day. Puncture the illusion of a commonwealth, El Akkad asserts, fire a few shots into the crowd and put people in camps for a decade, and watch what happens…The novel's thriller premise notwithstanding, El Akkad applies a literary writer's care to his depiction of Sarat's psychological unpacking and the sensory details of her life…Whether read as a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok, an allegory of past conflicts or a study of the psychology of war, American War is a deeply unsettling novel. The only comfort the story offers is that it's a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
…American War is an unlikely mash-up of unsparing war reporting and plot elements familiar to readers of the recent young-adult dystopian series The Hunger Games and Divergent. From these incongruous ingredients, El Akkad has fashioned a surprisingly powerful novel—one that creates as haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy did in The Road, and as devastating a look at the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America…El Akkad has…deftly imagined the world his characters inhabit, and writes with…propulsive verve…He demonstrates cool assurance at using details—many gathered, it seems, during his years as a reporter—to make his fictional future feel alarmingly real. And he writes here with boldness and audacity…El Akkad has written a novel that not only maps the harrowing effects of violence on one woman and her family, but also becomes a disturbing parable about the ruinous consequences of war on ordinary civilians.
From the Publisher
Follow the tributaries of today’s political combat a few decades into the future and you might arrive at something as terrifying as Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War. Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anxiously speculating about in the Trump era: a nation riven by irreconcilable ideologies, alienated by entrenched suspicions. . . . both poignant and horrifying.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Whether read as a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok, an allegory of past conflicts or a study of the psychology of war, American War is a deeply unsettling novel. The only comfort the story offers is that it’s a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.”
—Justin Cronin, The New York Times Book Review
“El Akkad . . . has an innate (and depressingly timely) feel for the textural details of dystopia; if only his grim near-future fantasy didn’t feel so much like a crystal ball.”
—Leah Greenblat, Entertainment Weekly
“Powerful . . . If violence and conflict feel distant, journalist Omar El Akkad’s debut novel brings them home. . . . Despite its future setting, it’d feel wrong to call American War a work of science fiction. Hell, it’d even feel off to call it dystopian, given that it’s so few steps removed from our reality.”
—Kevin Nguyen, GQ
“American War is an extraordinary novel. El Akkad’s story of a family caught up in the collapse of an empire is as harrowing as it is brilliant, and has an air of terrible relevance in these partisan times.”
—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
“El Akkad has created a brilliantly well-crafted, profoundly shattering saga of one family’s suffering in a world of brutal power struggles, terrorism, ignorance, and vengeance. American War is a gripping, unsparing, and essential novel for dangerously contentious times.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Terrifyingly plausible . . . Part family chronicle, part apocalyptic fable, American War is a vivid narrative of a country collapsing in on itself.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Gripping and frightening . . . Well written, inventive, and engaging, this relentlessly dark tale introduces a fascinating character. . . . Highly recommended.”
—James Coan, Library Journal (starred review)
“Striking . . . A most unusual novel, one featuring a gripping plot and an elegiac narrative tone.”
—Rayyan Al-Shawaf, The Boston Globe
“Sarat is a fascinating character. . . . Thought-provoking [and] earnest . . . El Akkad’s formidable talent is to offer up a stinging rebuke of the distance with which the United States sometimes views current disasters, which are always happening somewhere else. Not this time.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, Los Angeles Times
“Depicting a world uncomfortably close to the one we live in, American War is as captivating as it is deeply frightening.”
—Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed.com
“American War is terrifying in its prescient vision of the future.”
—Maris Kreizman, New York magazine/Vulture
“Astounding, gripping and eerily believable . . . masterful . . . Both the story and the writing are lucid, succinct, powerful and persuasive.”
—Lawrence Hill, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“Ambitious . . . [a] complex, thoroughly imagined domestic dystopia.”
—Terra Arnone, National Post (Toronto)
“Omar El Akkad has created an American future that is both terrifying and plausible. In a world seared and flooded by global warming, the U.S. has fractured again into North and South. The barbarism that ensues is all the more awful because we know the rivers and the cities. And we know these people: they are our neighbors; they are us. Through the eyes of a young girl El Akkad lets us see the soul-crushing toll of war. It was only in the stunned minutes after I’d finished the novel that I realized he had also taught us how to make a consummate terrorist.”
—Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars and Celine
“American War, a work of a singular, grand, brilliant imagination, is a warning shot across the bow of the United States. Omar El Akkad has created a novel that isn’t afraid to be a pleasurable yarn as it delves into the hidden currents of American culture and extrapolates from them to envision a deeply tragic potential future.”
—David Means, author of Hystopia
“Omar El Akkad’s urgent debut transmutes our society’s current dysfunction into a terrifying yet eerily recognizable future, where contemporary global and local conflicts have wreaked havoc on American soil. The threads between today and that future are his masterfully shaped characters. Their resilience, savagery, and humanity serve both as a portrait of who we are but also what we might very well become.”
—Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing
“Depicting a world uncomfortably close to the one we live in, American War is as captivating as it is deeply frightening.”
—Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed.com
“American War is terrifying in its prescient vision of the future.”
—Maris Kreizman, New York magazine
“Piercing . . . Written with precise care for the fictional truth . . . the book sounds a warning blast. American War is a disquieting novel of immense depth, and possibly a classic of our time.
—Al Woodworth, Omnivoracious.com
“Although set in America, [El Akkad’s] riveting story in many ways transcends politics, with details so impeccable and a plot so tightly woven that the events indeed feel factual.”
—Alice Cary, BookPage
“A dystopian vision . . . cannily imagined . . . But above all, El Akkad’s novel is an allegory about present-day military occupation, from drone strikes to suicide bombers to camps full of refugees.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"Stunning."
—Michele Filgate, O, the Oprah Magazine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-01-23
A dystopian vision of a future United States undone by civil war and plague.El Akkad's debut novel is set during the tail end of the 21st century, with the North and South at it again. Southern states have taken up arms to protest a Northern ban on fossil fuels, and the war-torn secessionist "Mag" (Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia) has forced civilians to herd in refugee camps. (South Carolina, attacked by a weaponized virus, is "a walled hospice.") Among the refugees is Sarat, who as a young girl in 2075 escaped a much-diminished Louisiana (climate change has swallowed the coasts) with her family to what seems like an endless occupation. But in the years tracked by the novel, Sarat becomes a daring young woman who leads a resistance against the Northern military. El Akkad, a journalist who's reported from hot spots in the war on terror, has a knack for the language of officialdom: news reports, speeches, history books, and the like that provide background for the various catastrophes that have befallen the country. And he's cannily imagined Sarat, who is at once a caring daughter and sibling, freedom fighter, and sponge for the wisdom of one old-timer who dispenses tales about occupations decades past. But above all, El Akkad's novel is an allegory about present-day military occupation, from drone strikes to suicide bombers to camps full of refugees holding "keys to houses that no longer existed in towns long ago deserted." He imagines this society in some creative ways: battles royal are major entertainments in an internet-free society, and Sarat's brother becomes an interesting and peculiar folk hero after he's injured. But El Akkad mainly means to argue that these future miseries exist now overseas. A well-imagined if somber window into social collapse.
