Seattle Reads again

Airplane rides are useful. Of course, moving long distances at great speed is valuable. But there’s more. For example, a direct return flight from Seattle to Dallas is plenty long enough to read a novel, including time for naps each way. How do I know this? I know through experience.

Very recently I read, on both ends of a long weekend, the ‘Seattle Reads’ book of the year, Secret Son. Like other years, it’s not a very good book. However, it certainly raises LOTS of contemporary issues regarding East/West, wealth/poverty, social standing, nationalism, politics, language, family duty, love, manipulation, coming of age, honor, and education. Hmm, strange, now that I’ve listed the themes they appear more perennial than acute….

Helpful, at the back of the book there is an anonymous interviewer questioning the author, Laila Lalami. The interviewer could probably pose more interesting questions, but it does give me a sense of what Seattle was thinking in choosing this book. Lalami did a fine job responding to the questions and possibly speaks as well or better than she writes.

Lalami tells us that she tries to write “the most engaging, the most complex, and the most truthful story” she can. Complex I rate very high. Truthful I rate quite high. Engaging slips to a pretty low percentile. I wish I could say that if I wasn’t stuck on an airplane with no other novel, or if I was indifferent about reading for my book group conversation next week, that I would have found it a good use of my time, but I might not.

That lies are told in Morocco, even in Casablanca, where the interviewer insists heretofore in the American imagination only romance blooms a la Bogart and Bergman, isn’t altogether surprising. That locals and foreigners alike prey on the weak cannot surprise, either. Both of these together, as the two bruising whips driving the plot, however, do come as a surprise. Surely the portrait of even the cruelest poverty can be drawn with beautiful lines, making one unable to put away what hurts to view. But there it goes: away, secret, done.