Once a rising star in the religious community, Imam Salim becomes disillusioned in the face of unrelenting institutions. “I met sheikhs, scions of media empires, oil tycoons and mullahs who led revolutions against sheikhs and oil tycoons and scions of media empires,” he wrote in a letter to Youssef. But the infusion of foreign capital, Salim fears, encourages both thinking monopolies and industry. Khalid’s research spans academia, real estate and electoralism, sparing no one.
“Brother Alive” is a nervous, episodic read, but its pivot is sobering in its magnitude. The romantic New York chapters are combined with warm family scenes and melancholy walks through the city. In the talkative, incoherent second half of the book, the nostalgia is brushed aside with a wave of bullets and biowarfare. The contrast is akin to the logical exercises of DeLillo’s grungier titles, such as “Great Jones Street” (1973) and “Mao II” (1991). In “Brother Alive,” the breakdown of the story raises sequential questions: Do believers choose their faith? How else to live within a system built on suffering? The seductive Hollywood glare of the early chapters is taken away, revealing an underbelly of conspiracies. Men die, movements wither and businesses remain.
Khalid is such a gifted commentator that his methods are scrutinized. Brother takes the form of a menagerie, depending on his mood, and feeds on Youssef’s emotions like a parasite; in most cases, Brother feels as real as Youssef’s flesh-and-blood siblings. Why so much magical realism in a novel about Saudi trade? Although the allegory is based on current events, “Brother Alive” is neither a press bulletin nor a position paper. Khalid’s sentences are full of flowery, poetic metaphors, while maintaining the truncated, declarative tempo of scripture. While visiting the 9/11 Memorial with Dayo, Youssef beholds the skyscrapers of the financial district. “The buildings in the area were translucent spreadsheets, their cells like oil slicks,” he notes. Youssef appreciates his broken world and, try as he may, can’t imagine a better one.
His desperation to do this drives him insane. “Brother Alive” is Rushdie without the ceremony, a searing collage of the deep and the mundane. Khalid’s Staten Islanders witness miracles, but the congregation has a somber, static solemnity. As conglomerates and governments tighten their means of repression, Youssef’s fantastic visions act as both a warning and a prayer. Amid the endlessly gentrifying ghetto that is the United States, there must be more than meets the eye.