Book Review: New in Print

Montecore

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Knopf, 336 pp., $26.95

My hopes for Montecore were nearly dashed when I noticed that, like so many other recent review copies populating the Chronicle's mailbox, its protagonist shares a name with its author. Whatever insights writers hope we gain from the deployment of this shopworn metafictional technique usually fade in all the time it takes chewing gum to lose its snap. The idea that novelists might draw heavily on real-life experience in crafting their bildungsromans doesn't bother me in the slightest, and I find myself yearning to read anything in which the visceral, confounding substance of human relationships pulls focus from the shiny but ultimately empty trappings of postmodern anxiety.

Happily, Montecore is too inventive to rest on mere conceits, although it boasts plenty. The character Jonas, a young writer of Swedish and Tunisian descent, agrees to co-author a biography of his father, Abbas, with his father's oldest friend, Kadir. The two exchange drafts of the increasingly elaborate story, negotiating its arc as they progress. Kadir casts the narrative in heroic tones, portraying his friend Abbas' rise to cosmopolitan prominence in the world of political photography as a victory, while Jonas sees his father's success as an act of cowardice, finding that integration into Swedish society has dulled his father's understanding of the tensions of the immigrant experience – or, to put it in the novel's jazzy patois, his father has become a true "Swediot."

Jonas and Kadir wrestle for narrative control, resulting in a complex, footnoted telling of Abbas' progression from orphan of the French occupation in Tunisia to Swedish stay-at-home dad and, after he's abandoned his family, photographer of such dubious productions as Lawrence of Hoe-rabia and Aladdin and His Magic Tramp and eventually, renowned contemporary of Avedon and Cartier-Bresson. Beneath the levity and smarting cultural commentary, though, the story is driven by Jonas trying to understand or at least vent the grief of being abandoned. Montecore deals in the sparkling tropes of contemporary fiction but very successfully grounds them in old-fashioned familial anguish. With style to spare and a keen take on the political turmoil of a region recently thrown into high-media focus, Montecore shows a young novelist swinging for the fences and hitting hard.