2 of 3

Ironically,the closer the two families grow, the more painfully different they feel. Ziba feels drawn to the older, more maternal Bitsy Donaldson, but Sami finds Bitsy irritating. His sense of separateness makes it hard for him to see her eccentricities as personal rather than generally American—her bossiness, for example, or her need to turn everything, even potty-training, into an occasion (Bitsy's solution to the pacifier problem is classic: sending all the Binkies away on balloons, thereby initiating a metereological disaster). Bitsy herself can't understand the Yazdans' need to be "normal" Americans—why, for instance, they change their daughter's name from the Korean "Sooki" to boring old "Susan" (Bitsy and her husband saddle their own poor child with the name "Jin-Ho Dickinson-Donaldson").  Still, for all the minor irritations of the friendship, the two families feel more in common with each other than with all the "natural parents" around them.

Can this unlikely friendship bear the weight of something more permanent and emotionally binding—a marriage, for instance? When Bitsy's widowed father, Dave Dickinson, falls in love with proud, beautiful Maryam Yazdan, both families watch with mixed joy and trepidation. Maryam rebuffs him at first, but the persistent Dave overcomes her reserve and for a little while they enjoy a true and tender romance. Hopes are high, but so are the stakes. Eventually, Maryam will have to decide whether to commit to Dave or move on and grow old alone.  The future of the two families' friendship seems to depend her decision.

Tyler writes sympathetically from the point of view of several characters, including children (Jin-Ho's chapter is wonderful, maybe the best in the book). The last third of the novel, though, really belongs to Maryam, a woman unsure of herself after many years in America.  She still finds Americans baffling and frustrating; more than ever, she resents their casual, even cheery plundering of other cultures and traditions (as if everything belonged to them, anyway). She loathes their almost rapacious interest in her foreignness, the way they fuss over her exotic habits—it's as if they're really saying, "You're not of us, you're not really American."      

But Maryam isn't at home with other Iranians, either; she dislikes the coarseness of the young generation. She doesn't blend well with her daughter-in-law's family, the buoyant, loud Hakimis, who, for their part, see her as aloof and intimidating. Even Maryan's son Sami misunderstands her. Because her marriage to his father was arranged and carried out by proxy (before they reunited in America), he assumes it was loveless and unromantic. That shows how little Sami knows about his mother and father; but how could Maryam ever explain herself to him, her son, who has become a foreigner to her?

Maryam's tragedy is that she loves and needs people but finds the "translation" of herself difficult in a foreign society, even a free and open one where people accept cultural differences. Becoming an American is hard work, not unlike staying married or enduring a lifetime of Christmases with impossible family members.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

August (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50