ZAIN KHAID
Zain Khalid’s first novel, “Brother Alive,” is bursting with imagination and literary references, and so is the author’s conversation.
Describing the book, he said, “You’ve got something of a bildungsroman, and then you’ve got an epistolary memoir and a left-wing political thriller, and it’s kind of,” before drifting off to another multi-layered thought.
In a short conversation, Khalid mentioned the influences of the writers Don DeLillo, Tao Lin, Barry Hannah, Toni Morrison, Italo Calvino, Atticus Lish, Fernanda Melchor, Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Bernhard. In the book’s acknowledgments, he thanks more than 50 writers for what he has “borrowed,” from Edith Wharton to Octavia Butler. “For me, the line between art and myself,” he said, “is not healthy.”
Despite all these influences – or perhaps because of its sheer volume – “Brother Alive” couldn’t be confused with anyone else’s work. The story of three brothers, related by adoption, moves from New York to Saudi Arabia, with themes such as family secrets, geography and fate, utopianism and much more.
Khalid, 32, grew up on Staten Island until he was 12, the child of parents with ancestry in a “few places,” he said, including India, Pakistan and parts of the Middle East. The borough, he said, is often caricatured as the city’s “weird conservative sibling,” but the diversity of immigrants is part of what appealed to him when he rooted the book there.
In a large Muslim family like his, Khalid said, “the lines between cousins/brothers, sisters/mothers blur. It’s almost as if the traditional taxonomy doesn’t really apply.”
