The true
horror of puberty is not the emergence of surprising hairs and baneful odors
but the abrupt arrival of consequences. Physical ones, obviously, but also
existential consequences. To enter puberty is to discover not only that the
stakes have ratcheted up, but that such a thing as “stakes” exist.
اضافة اعلان
Kamila Shamsie’s
novel “
Best of Friends” begins at this volatile time — and in a volatile
location: Karachi, 1988. The best friends are Maryam Khan and Zahra Ali. Maryam
is intuitive and romantic; Zahra cerebral and skeptical. Both are 14. Both are
privileged, but only Maryam is super rich, with private security guarding the
family manse and a promise that she will inherit her grandfather’s luxury
leather goods business.
Roads are about to
fork. Puberty comes to Maryam first. Initially she thinks she has “lost the
ability to judge her own dimensions” — like a person hopping into a rental car
and immediately severing a side mirror — until she observes that when she
accidentally bumps breast-first into strangers, the strangers are always, and
suspiciously, men. Zahra experiences her own similar metamorphosis soon after.
Their new
visibility is briefly enjoyable. Being a pretty young girl delivers all the
rewards of fame without any of the striving normally required to achieve it:
People are nice to Maryam and Zahra, boys are awed by them, strangers are glad
to perform random favors. But the downside is significant. An ambient thrum of
potential sexual violence culminates in an episode in which the two are
abducted — though not physically assaulted — by a classmate’s driver.
At the novel’s
midpoint we jump forward three decades to London in 2019. Here it becomes clear
that “Best of Friends” is not quite a novel but more like two novellas, the
first energetic and the second bland. Going from the Karachi half to the London
half is like exiting an idiosyncratic local restaurant and entering a
Starbucks. There’s an anonymous sleekness — almost a CGI-enhanced quality — to
the second section.
It begins with a
pair of articles: a profile of Zahra in The Guardian and one of Maryam in
Yahoo! Finance. It is an awkward device for inserting 30 years’ worth of
exposition, but nonetheless, here is what we learn: Zahra received a
scholarship to Cambridge, got married and divorced, leads Britain’s oldest
civil liberties organization, and hangs out with George Clooney. Maryam, also a
London transplant, became a tech millionaire at age 26, lost everything when
the dot-com bubble burst, and rebounded as a successful venture capitalist
whose firm bears the realistically awful name of Venture Further.
Because the book
is a saga of close female friendship, it is hard not to compare it unfavorably
with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Ferrante wrote about the pain of
knowing oneself to be inferior to the person one loves most. In those novels,
Elena was merely intelligent where Lila was brilliant; attractive where Lila
was irresistible. But in other ways the personalities of the girls were
complementary and their mutual understanding complete enough to approach a
profound and sacred redundancy. (“Sacred redundancy” is the closest I can come
to a definition of best friendship.)
At the novel’s midpoint we jump forward three decades to London in 2019. Here it becomes clear that “Best of Friends” is not quite a novel but more like two novellas, the first energetic and the second bland.
The elements that
intensified the friendship of Elena and Lila — their rivalry, crises, and
lopsided distribution of gifts — are present in “Best of Friends” but
desaturated. So is the context. Ferrante conveyed a milieu as electrically as
she did a relationship. Shamsie gets close in her evocations of 1980s Karachi,
but the featureless depiction of London saps the novel of structure. The drama
between Zahra and Maryam plays out as if against a green screen. Without a
sense of where we are and when, the characters — and everything they do, the
whats and whys — take on the quality of anecdotes.
Back to Ferrante:
That author used the device of dialect to study the nature of geographical
belonging and estrangement. For Maryam and Zahra, educated in English from
their early school days, there is no such fortuitous metaphor. Shamsie toys a
bit with language, and by “a bit” I mean a handful of sentences about the
inadequacy of legal vocabulary and the inclusion of an Urdu phrase at a pivotal
moment. But these are offhand gestures, not a method of exploration.
If language is no
obstacle to the women, neither is relocation. For Maryam and Zahra the transit
from Karachi to London is fairly easy. And maybe this is not the point of the
book, but a point of it: that sufficient funds, credentials, and networks add
up to a pre-assimilation that makes such an immigration as seamless as tapping
a credit card against a machine in exchange for a venti oat milk latte.
Shamsie’s previous
novel “Home Fire” was a retelling of “Antigone,” and readers who loved that
book (as I did) might consider approaching “Best of Friends” with subdued
expectations. There are plenty of sentences to cherish, as when a politician is
described as a “sadistic flapjack” or when a four-year-old Zahra perceives her
father’s face as having “an odd texture” because she’s too young to fathom that
adults can weep.
Even without the
scaffolding of a Greek tragedy, there is a version of this novel that could
have worked. The lives of Zahra and Maryam don’t intrinsically lack conflict.
There is plenty of fiction about people who enjoy material comforts while
suffering from psychological or spiritual torments. The problem is that these
two are never convincingly tormented; only hassled, and their responses are
proportionately bloodless.
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