2-07-06, 8:38 am
Against Gravity, Iranian writer Farnoosh Moshiri’s stirring latest novel, is set mainly in Houston, Texas in the 1980s. The events in the book are interwoven with the global circumstances of the Cold War at a time when the Reagan administration vigorously supported brutal regimes and terrorist movements in Central America and the Middle East in the name of fighting communism. On the home front, the administration was refusing to address the growing AIDS epidemic or the deepening economic crisis as poverty and ultra right social policies drove the sick into the streets, the poor underground and the working class to near despair.
This context shapes the lives of the novel’s three main characters who narrate the novel’s three sections. Madison Kirby, struggling with mental illness and HIV/AIDS, is haunted by memories of his father, tormented by social alienation, drug addiction and unfulfilled love. Roya Saraabi is an Iranian immigrant mother who escaped with her daughter from the tyranny of the fundamentalist regime that rose to power after a broad national movement overthrow the US-backed despot Shah Pahlavi. After living in Afghanistan and India, she reluctantly makes her way to Texas where the 'American dream' proves violently contradictory. The third principal character, Ric Cardinal, is a radical but disillusioned social worker whose political and romantic entanglements leave him isolated.
The lives of these three people collide and intertwine over a decade, finally climaxing just before the launch of the first invasion of Iraq. Throughout the novel the characters examine their lives and memories, trying to understand who and where they are and how they get there. Madison is rapidly closing in on death, which he laments is like being pushed out just before he was able to make his mark in the world. 'I was worthless,' he thinks in a moment of brutal clarity. 'I had done nothing. I was being pushed out of life before I had left a mark. What had I done in my life? What had I created or achieved?'
Roya has been in the country three days when she meets Madison. Victimized by the regime in Iran and unconfident about her ability to speak English or to even interact with her new neighbors, Roya withdraws from Madison’s clumsy and manic advances. Struggling with two or three jobs at any given time, a daughter who is uncomfortable with life in Houston, and her memories, Roya has little time for romance. Yet, she yearns for intimacy and validation.
Her ongoing existential struggle is between her memories and her present life. 'Didn’t the people of my past deserve remembering?' she wonders at one point. 'Wasn’t I finally acquiring an identity by forgetting who I’d been?' Success in the US seemed to be dependent on shaking free from the anchors of the past, but Roya isn’t ready to lose herself that way.
The three characters are brought together when Madison suggests that Roya seek help finding work and counseling for her daughter from his close friend Ric Cardinal who co-founded a social service agency that assists some of Houston’s underprivileged. Ironically, Ric helps bring material and medical help to the victims of capitalism, but he too is anguished. Childhood abandonment by his parents and the grotesqueness of his grandfather’s embalming business have fostered in Ric deep fears of loss and death. A series of failed dysfunctional relationships, political disillusionment fueled by the revelation that his close comrade was an FBI agent, and his son’s growing mental illness, cause Ric to resist forming strong personal attachments. His dog Willy seems a more suitable companion. Will he find the emotional resources he needs to not only carry on, but to continue to believe in fighting for people’s needs, for justice?
Moshiri weaves a beautiful tale from the fabric of real life. This novel is an immigrant’s tale, but not in the usual sense. It isn’t a story about making it in a land of opportunity, or other mythical views of what life is like here. It is a story about the intersection of wounded lives trampled on by forces larger than themselves. It is about loss, sadness, rejection and hopelessness, yet in these people and their stories we see mirrored our own struggles to survive, to find happiness and worth, even as we are confronted by life. Along with violence, anger, hate and despair, we can see hope and potential happiness, not as a result of some myth of the 'American dream,' but rather as a result of our solidarity with one another and the continued faith in the rightness of our struggle.
Against Gravity is an honest, sensitive and well-written tour de force. It is the novel that shines brightest among Moshiri’s three brilliant novels. Moshiri has also authored At the Wall of the Almighty and The Bathouse, both set in Iran during the rise of the fundamentalist regime.
