Zia Haider Rahman’s novel, In the Light of What We Know, is one of the dozen or so books I read in 2014 that really stays with me, for many good reasons, but also for one that isn’t so good. I’m not sure I can make the critique without revealing too much, so you should probably skip this post if you haven’t read it yet and plan to. 

As I’ve said before, the work is an amazing panorama, full of ideas, and contains a framed tale that’s worthy of Thomas Mann. That’s stunning for any novelist, especially a debuting one.

The trouble I have is that there’s a scene of horrific violence against a female character by a male one who sees her as an abstraction, a figure onto which he can project his dreams and anguish, rather than as an actual person. There’s nothing wrong with writing a character who sees another this way; we’re probably more likely to commit violence against those whose humanity we can erase, and it’s a worthwhile topic to meditate on and try to understand. The problem I have is that the female character isn’t only an abstraction to her fictional victimizer but to the readers as well because that’s the way the author has left her. And the victimizer, often a witty and sardonic guy, is a full-fledged character, who, while pitiful, probably is the more sympathetic creation. Doesn’t feel right.

In her essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hannah Harris Green sums up the situation really well. An excerpt:

“The lack of human qualities in Emily — more so than the lack of appealing qualities — really disturbed me, especially in the context of a book that consistently views women with disdainful and predatory eyes. Zafar notes that women lose most of their beauty after the age of 18, and that older women in literature are given more credit than they deserve for being ‘feisty’ and ‘strongheaded’—’things which if found in a man would scarcely get a mention.’ Elsewhere, Zafar explains that many women wait too long to become mothers in order to focus on their careers. A reader begins to doubt that these passages are simply the thoughts of a misogynistic character when they are buttressed by long descriptions of body shape and unbuttoning of blouses that come whenever a female character is introduced. We are assured within a few sentences that any new female is both beautiful and thin — as if even the possibility of imagining another kind of woman would be offensive to the reader. It’s typical for a woman to be introduced in this way: ‘It would be disingenuous of me not to confess that what was most striking about Lauren were her breasts. I would have bet my bottom dollar it was a push-up bra that made for the flawless curves.’ The narrator, who is responsible for this one, at least admits several times that he has a shallow personality, but of course Zafar is no better. In Afghanistan, he meets the director of an international microfinance organization. We get a thorough description of how her outfit highlights her curves, before he notes that her ‘name was fit for a porn star.’

It’s tempting to think that the absence of a female perspective to combat this heavily male gaze is intentional — an extent of the novel’s conceit that all people have their blind spots, even someone as scrupulous and multifaceted as Zafar. But the evidence isn’t there — not in the book itself, nor in the author’s interactions with the press. In an interview with Guernica Magazine last month, Rahman admitted that his choice to use the first person did limit him somewhat, as it forced him to exclude anything that the narrator himself doesn’t perceive. But here is the example he gives of an element he regretted cutting: ‘For instance, I have a passage in which the narrator retells the story of a cherished bicycle he had as a boy that disappeared. He gets through the story without seeing that his mother was having an affair because his eye is on the bicycle.’ So the first person narrative forced Rahman to exclude not a female point of view, but yet another instance of a woman behaving in a deceptive way.”