Laleh Khadivi Selected Works

Laguna Beach, California, 2010. Alireza Courdee, a fourteen-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner. He loses his virginity, takes up surfing, and sneaks away to all-night raves. For the first time, Reza—now Rez—feels like an American teen. Life is smooth; even lying to his strict father comes easily.

But then he changes again, falling out with the bad boy surfers and in with a group of kids more awake to the world around them, who share his background, and whose ideas fill him with a very different sense of purpose. Within a year, Reza and two friends are making their way to Syria to join in the fight.

Timely, nuanced, and emotionally forceful, A Good Country is a gorgeous meditation on modern life, religious radicalization, and a young man caught among vastly different worlds. What we are left with at the dramatic end is not an assessment of good or evil, east versus west, but a lingering question that applies to all souls: Does a person decide how to live, or is their life decided for them?

Told with an evocative richness of language that recalls Michael Ondaatje or Anita Desai, the story of Reza Khourdi is that of the 20th century everyman, cast out from the clan in the name of nation, progress and modernity who cannot help but leave behind a shadow that yearns for the impossible dreams of love, land and home. Before following his father into battle, he had been like any other Kurdish boy: in love with his Maman, fascinated by birds and the rugged Zagros mountains, dutiful to his stern and powerful Baba. But after he becomes orphaned in a massacre by the armies of Iran's new Shah, Reza Pahlavi I.; he is taken in by the very army that has killed his parents, re-named Reza Khourdi, and indoctrinated into the modern, seductive ways of the newly minted nation, careful to hide his Kurdish origins with every step. The Age of Orphans follows Reza on his meteoric rise in ranks, his marriage to a proud Tehrani woman and his eventual deployment, as Capitan, back to the Zagros Mountains and the ever-defiant Kurds. Here Reza is responsible for policing, and sometimes killing, his own people, and it is here that his carefully crafted persona begins to fissure and crack.

Saladin Khourdi has always known he will leave Iran. He spends his days in the cinema, dreaming of Hollywood stars in swimming pools. For his older brother, Ali, Iran is their home, their history. But both will have to leave, when the 1979 revolution leads to a killing in their mountain village. For both, there is a question of how far they will go, weighing the danger of return against the danger of continuing.

Laleh Khadivi’s novel moves fluidly through time, and from the Khourdi brothers to the broader chorus of the Iranian diaspora, to create a stunning sense of a people caught between the ancient and the modern, tossed by political currents. In the story of Saladin and Ali, she explores the tension in all immigrants, the attachment to the place they must leave, and the dreams in the places they land. It is, at last, Saladin alone who touches down in Los Angeles. He is hungry, and homeless, but he is not invisible—the city is unexpectedly heated with hate as the hostage crisis unfolds back in Iran. Los Angeles means avoiding confrontation while searching for work, counting coins and collecting sand in his shoes. But as Saladin slowly makes connections in this new place, he must determine whether home can be made anew.