Destiny’s Child

Rabih Alameddine’s new novel unfolds like a secret, guarded too long, which is at last pushing toward the light: It moves in jagged lines, flows forward and backward andsideways. It grows by bits and pieces, each one as thrilling, as restrained and mystifying as the other, creating a tale that is fluid and spare, humorous and heartbreaking and always real. Born in pre-civil war Lebanon, Sarah Nour El-Din has been named for “the Divine Sarah” Bernhardt. Her father is a Druze, her mother an American. Her parents had met at the beach of the American University of Beirut, where he was studying to become a doctor. They married in spite of his family’s opposition to his taking a foreigner for a wife. The young doctor did this--defied common sense and the expectations of the close-knit Druze community--because he loved the American “more than any man ever loved a woman.”

The American, in turn, has tried to appease her in-laws and gain acceptance into her husband’s community. She has learned Arabic, cooks Lebanese dishes, never misses a wedding or a funeral. She has given up the independent spirit that had brought her to Lebanon in the first place. She has become quiet and deferential, “swallowed whole,” Sarah tells us, by the land she had once come to conquer. And she may have succeeded, may have managed to keep the life she has paid for so dearly, but for one unpardonable mistake: Instead of producing an heir to carry his father’s name, the American has given her husband three daughters.

The first daughter was greeted by the Druze family with mild disappointment. The second caused alarm. The third one, Sarah, will lead to the demise of her parents’ marriage: Convinced that his wife is unable to give him a son, the doctor divorces the American woman. Then, of course, the tragedy begins.

“When my father divorced my mother and sent her back to America,” Sarah explains matter-of-factly, “she put a curse on our house from which none of us escaped.... The curse was a life of loneliness. If you ... scrutinized our hearts, you would come across a loneliness so enveloping, so overwhelming, it frightens the uninitiated.” Alameddine tells Sarah’s story in language that is honest and ironic and never tainted with self-pity. He re-creates a place where intelligent, educated people live under the shadow of ancient curses and distant ghosts, a land where intense violence and extreme tenderness exist side by side, often within the same home. He tells of a war that goes on for so long that it becomes a way of life, talks of souls that are at once mutilated and rendered whole through their connection to one another and their families.

In Lebanon during the war, Sarah grows up resenting her father for ruining what he has described to her as a fairy-tale love affair, resenting also the young second wife he has brought into the house for the purpose of producing a son. The stepmother will bear two daughters before finally delivering a son. One of her daughters will die at the hands of a mad suitor. Another girl, Sarah’s sister from the American wife, is so devastated by the loss of her mother that she will go mad. The only boy in the family--the vaunted and longed-for son expected to carry the doctor’s name--will be openly and unapologetically gay, with no intention of perpetuating his father’s line. At 18, Sarah leaves home for America, coming in part to seek the mother she last saw when she was 2 years old. Instead of the pair of open arms she has longed for, however, she encounters a lonely, bitter woman who has little time for her daughter. The mother, it seems, has been afflicted by the same curse she put upon her former husband and his children.

“She had been wronged,” Sarah concludes, “and lived that wrong for the rest of her life.” On her own in the West, Sarah marries and divorces twice and falls in love with a third man who leaves her without an explanation. Neither Druze nor American, neither the obedient wife nor the confident rebel, she lives by half-truths and conjectures and tries hopelessly to find a connection with her past.

Telling her story is also Sarah’s attempt to understand the forces, seemingly beyond her control, that drive her toward self-ruination. But the past, she learns, is ever-changing and open to interpretation. It has many beginnings and just as many shapes--hence the 45 first chapters, prologues and introductions that constitute the book. The past also has a way of re-creating itself in the destinies of those most harmed by it: Sarah gives up her own child to her second husband and lets him take the boy back to Lebanon to be raised without her. Therein lies the tragedy of yet another damaged life: Sarah concedes that, like her father, she too fell out of love with a spouse and like her mother, she is no longer with her child. “I did not forgive my father his treatment of my mother,” Sarah confesses, “until I repeated the same story.”