Customer Reviews

Only the Lonely

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I wound up liking this book quite a lot, but at first I found myself unexpectedly resistant, comparing it at every turn to John Updike's recent novel TERRORIST which shares some of the same themes and something of the same milieu. And really on almost every count TERRORIST was winning out. But then I let myself settle into Gary Zebrun's rhythms

The sadness of a decaying theater, the palace of dreams forced to face reality, is always seductive, though Zebrun doesn't do anything new with it, but who could after FOLLIES and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW made this such a ubermotif of the 1970s? Individual movie memories of Asim and Sonia are pleasing and poignant, but some of them fall flat. Zevrun tries hard to make something of the movies playing at the Bethlehem Theater in the weeks preceding 9/11, but GHOST WORLD and FROM HELL with Johnny Depp just don't have the emotional resonance that he tries to hang off of them. Sonia herself, the Russian mistress of Asim's dead father, is like a crazy Latvian scramble of Blanche DuBois and Mary Tyrone, the sort of part Simone Signoret was often forced to take in her old age, and reading her adventures here makes me wish Signoret was still with us for one last stab at an Oscar.

I always like a book with a good strong conflict between brothers, and the one between sectarian Tarik and the laissez-faire Asim is piping hot. Tarik can't stand the loose ways of the infidels in Lackawanna, and he finds evidence everywhere that his brother has defected to the side of the heathen. The brother walks around their home naked, when their religion says that it's sinful for one man to see another without his clothes (or even to look on one's own body while naked, even in a mirror). Both boys suffer from the lack of a cohesive family unit, and the whole suffering Rust Belt mentality of the citizens around them mirrors the familial disintegration in myriad ways. Sometimes the whole town seems thigh-high in vulgarity, random acts of violence, and the uncomfortable feeling of not enough padding between life and death.

I will look forward with interest to whatever Gary Zebrun decides to give us next, and I'll look backwards to find a copy of his first novel which somehow I missed out on.

Asim Zahid is a 19 year old gay boy stuck in the steel industry blue collar town of Lakawanna NY, his plans to go away to college at least postponed temporarily by the unexpected death of his father, and Asim's decision to remain in town to run the family business, the town's old movie theatre. He lives with his sister, Masika, and a brother, Tarik, who has become a member of an Islam extremist group, in these days right before September 11, 2001. Also in Asim's life is Sonia, his father's former mistress, whose life revolves around the films she faithfully views at the movie theatre, and Billy, an Irish local who has become Asim's first lover. Each of them suffers from some degree of loneliness, with extremely different ways of coping with it. When Asim is threatened because of his unwillingness to aid Tarik's terrorist group, Billy tries to jump to his defense, but this is something that Asim knows he must deal with in his own way, as the calendar nears the day when everything will irrevocably change.

I enjoyed Zebrun's first novel, "Someone You Know," although I found it a bit dark. This is much more so, and a bit depressing for my taste. I also feel it somewhat reinforces small town America paranoia about people of Middle Eastern descent being suspected as terrorists. But the book itself is well-written, and nothing short of a masterpiece in the way it tells its story through the diverse emotions of the various characters. I'll give it four stars out of five.