Customer Reviews

Sons and Other Flammable Objects: A Novel

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was excited to read Ms. Khakpour's debut novel, "Sons and Other Flammable Objects" having highly enjoyed her funny witty NYT oped ("Iranian Revolution Barbie") and her [...] bad sex essay (we all have one in us). However, as clever as she is, and this is clear from her writing and the way she structures her book, I found myself plowing rather than breezing through it.

The characters never felt real, but more like foils for what they stand for: the stultified father, the wayward son, the hang dog mother, the beautiful girlfriend, the forgotten homeland.

There are many flashes of bizarre and poignant depth, but it's so overwritten as to overwhelm the story (essentially a story about broken families). The descriptions are multiplicitous but without adding enough to the scenes to warrant the verbiage (although don't get me wrong - many scenes and even the stock characters have a startlingly original and haunting quality).

Sometimes I found the father and son characters interchangeable in their careless slangy speech patterns. And I also thought the symbolism and foreshadowing and historical and metaphorical parallels heavy handed. For example, did all three (father, mother, son) all have to have the exact same thought about flying in planes being out of space and time and thus a reprieve of sorts from life? I got it the first time around.

I wish she had slashed about a quarter of the book, and spent more time making her characters real rather than tragic and symbolic. It would have been much sharper and snappier, in line with her sharp snappy writing style.

Still, there aren't many books out there on the Iranian immigrant experience - and the loneliness of that existence (really any immigrant experience) is palpable in "Sons..." The book also spans both the east and west coasts and post-911 traumas, and does it all with a thoroughly modern sensibility. I'll look forward to more.

I've been reading a lot of just-in novels, and usually walk away like a cat: ambivalent, sorta hungry, and of course retaining no long-term memory. Not so with "Sons and Other Flammable Objects." Porochista Khakpour has answered some inner clarion call with this megawatt diamond, which she scrapes across the surface of the pane we've erected to keep the world out.

But in it comes, and here, suddenly, is a family not conveniently handicapped from mother or father-loss, and does not sublimate the issues of one child into another. There are two parents and one child, and Khakpour's entelechy reveals the crucible of this trinity...But in which, of course, the fourth wall is Iran. There is Darius, the father, who is "desperately annexed to his work world to add some dimension beyond father" and Lala, the mother, who is faced with a proto-Posh Spice existence in the shadow of her brooding husband and Xerxes, her mercurial, I Dream of Jeannie-obsessed son. Lala's surreal and occasionally crass experiences "making nice" beyond the confines of her Pasadena domecile are painful and realistic. After she survives a night out with her new posse, Lala feels " grateful to be alive in the night, even if it be with these strange and maybe ultimately undesirable people, but people nonetheless, and people who had some investment in her, something, she sensed."

Though Khakpour is the kind of writer who nails the description of being "deep in the type of tipsy that demanded everyone be tipsier," Khakpour herself is not this kind of host. She is not going to flambe you with her insights--they won't kick you out of the story, you won't get lost--but she's not going to cover them up when she leaves them eviscerated on your doorstep. Whites of eyes are "two lockets of white slime" and then there is "the toxic sh-t of adventure" and the dessicated Southern Californian life, with Beverly Hills and its "pathetic glittering length."

Khakpour is especially damning to the gasoline soul of Los Angeles--she's as harsh as anyone since Cintra Wilson in "Colors Insulting to Nature"--but with precision and in a way that perfectly fits how her characters' malaise so often has to do with their physical locales. This is just what people do: they damn the walls around them if they aren't able to directly address the traumas that deposited them there. She is so thoroughly married to each character in the estranged but still suffocating and insular Adam family, and the ease with which she shifts from one to the next--not to mention from one plot point or earthly coordinate--is masterful.

I don't know what else to say. You have to read this book.

Too many novels are populated by characters that the reader forgets almost as soon as the last page is turned and the book closed. Others, with any luck, offer one or two memorable ones to whom the reader is sorry to say goodbye. And then there are novels like Porochista Khakpour's Sons and Other Flammable Objects that contribute a whole family of unforgettable personalities.

The Adam family, mother, father and son, fled Iran for France when life became unbearable for them there but ultimately started new lives for themselves in Los Angeles. Xerxes, son of Laleh (who soon Americanized her name to Lala) and Darius Adam was so young when the family left Iran that he has only vague snatches of visual memories of his life there. He really came to consciousness only after arriving in California and, for the most part, he is a product of American culture. But still he senses that he is different and that that difference is the product of life inside the apartment of his parents who are, and always will be, Iranians at heart.

His parents are certainly a contrast of styles and messages. Lala is a naively good-hearted woman who is ready to embrace most things about American culture but her husband Darius expects her to stay inside her Los Angeles apartment and to live, as closely as possible, the same lifestyle that she left behind in Iran. Darius is a suspicious man by nature and his suspiciousness is compounded by the bitterness that he feels for having been forced to leave everything that he could not carry in a few suitcases behind when he fled Iran. He expects to rule his family with an iron fist and, as his wife and son become more and more independent of him, he resents the impossibility of making that happen. He is not a happy man.

The clash of two such very different cultures had a devastating impact on the Adam family. As Xerxes approached maturity, father and son hardly spoke to each other, and when they did, it was never pleasant for either of them. Darius and Lala grew farther and farther apart as she demanded more and more personal freedom from him. That was bad enough, but then came the events of 9-11 and all three of the Adams suddenly felt as much pressure outside the home as they did from within it.

Sons and Other Flammable Objects is a revealing portrayal of the struggle that immigrant families sometimes face when first-generation Americans grow up with a value set that differs greatly from the one held by their immigrant parents. Porochista Khakpour has written a remarkable first novel that still has me thinking about Darius, Lala and Xerxes and hoping that they are doing well. I won't soon forget them.

I really enjoyed reading the Sons and Other Flammable Objects. Khakpoor creates her characters so strongly they stay with you long after reading the book. The author has a very strong humor, she makes the reader laugh at the time she has just broken his/her heart. It is a refreshing novel well worth the time to read.

A unique, refreshing, and sometimes jarring book with a brilliant new voice. What struck me first is how humor and anger are so inextricably intertwined from page one of this "couldn't put it down" novel. Sometimes you literally don't know "whether to laugh or cry". This makes it both compelling and entertaining. This book is about a voyage on so many levels, much of it the kind of universal journey we are each taking in our own way; and yet, in this book, the trip is so engagingly culture-specific that you both empathize and learn some new perspective time and again. Most of all, this delightful book is about the intractable, maddening, and sometimes hilarious nature of human nature.

It had been a really long time since I read a book that made me laugh out loud.
But while reading this book by Porochista Khakpour, I found myself carrying it with me everywhere I went for a week. Reading it whenever I had down time or when out eating lunch. Almost every time I found myself laughing out loud or setting the book down to marvel at the writer's ability to make me care about the characters.

I fluctuated in feeling angry at the protaganist, worried for the father and hopeful for the mother. And in the end, the book didn't disappoint. I recommend this book to all readers who are in search of a new and unique voice that wraps wit and warmth in nearly every paragraph.

This book is, in a word, satisfying. The characters are whole and real and you'll feel as if you've met them in life and become close friends. The humor is sensitive, subtle, poignant, and there's even that touch of mystical synchronicity that is too often ignored in our supposedly (but not really) rational world. Seeds are planted early on, that, to the reader's delight, sprout and blossom in that "Ah, now I get it," kind of excitement. The book offers a rare glimpse at what it might be like to be a what sociologist Ruth Hill Useem called a "Third Culture Kid," negotiating two worlds that happen to be clashing and crashing all around you. As characters fall apart and put themselves back together and fall apart again, you'll giggle and weep all at once. Moving, excellent first novel. I'm looking forward to many more from the author.

I read Porochista Khakpour's Sons and Other Flammable Objects only because a friend recommended it. I begrudgingly obliged though I so dislike diasporic novels where writers whine about how they "don't fit here" and they "don't fit there" and that they are "strangers everywhere." They just make me wanna shout "Snap Out of It...will you?!"

To my delight and surprise Sons and Other Flammable Objects turned out to be so different. I not only cannot accuse it of being a run of the mill immigrant novel but I actually think that Porochista Khakpour (with her seemingly unpronounceable name) has created a super sassy yet sensually intelligent style of writing

Khakpour seems to be someone who just looooves words. One who is not afraid to weave long and complex phrases that describe basic human sensations. I am a word lover too so this was a gorgeous treat for me. The other thing that I love about the book is that it is written by a woman of Middle Eastern origin about mostly (two out of three main characters) Middle Eastern male characters! There is something daring or perhaps fetishistic (for me!) about women who venture into predominantly male spaces. And, Khakpour does an amazing job doing this...and keeping it up.

I would love to see Sons and Other... turned into a movie. The book seems so well edited, in a very cinematic way, that it would not be a stretch of a producer's imagination to make it happen! How about Orlando Bloom in the lead role of Xerxes?!

I expected more from a young Iranian-American writer. The style of writing here is difficult to understand, the characters difficult to relate to and the story is not exceptional. There are many other books that speak to the subject of family life, immigration and the Iranian experience much better than this pretentious attempt.

I just started this book and feel excited about reading it. I'm on page 10. I know I'll like it and finish it. If you care about narrative arc and things like that this book probably has that also but if you only care about sentences and if the author is an asshole or not this author isn't an asshole and has funny, interesting, readable, and clear sentences that make me excited that they wrote a book that I can read.

People said she can be the next Zadie Smith or something but Zadie Smith (though a little more interesting, funny, etc., to me, than other famous people) feels less interesting, funny, etc., to me than Porochista Khakpour. I say if anyone Porochista Khakpour's tone and sentences are like Lorrie Moore. A lot of times people get compared to Lorrie Moore and then people are disappointed when they read the person and they aren't Lorrie Moore. I'm just saying she is more like Lorrie Moore than Zadie Smith in terms of tone and focus and sentences.

Zadie Smith is not as sarcastic, 'exciting,' or 'wild' in terms of imagination as Lorrie Moore or Porochista Khakpour in my view based on what I know and how I feel right now. Thank you for reading my review.