“She’d grown pale, her eyes frozen, like she’d seen her own ghost. But aren’t we all exactly that? Each the ghost of an unchosen path,” writes Sanam Mahloudji in her debut, a multigenerational story of five Iranian women from the prestigious Valiat family, separated by personal and political revolutions, and each struggling to accept the path not taken.
The narrative is shared between the five voices, as it shifts back and forth across 80 years. There is Elizabeth, the matriarch, who – not blessed with the perfect features of her sisters – becomes fixated on her looks (“this is the story of a nose”, she tells us). Eventually she falls in love with a boy who loves her back; unfortunately, that boy is the son of her family’s chauffeur: not an ideal situation in 1940s Tehran. Bowing to pressure from her father, Elizabeth eventually marries someone of her own class; frail and elderly by the time the 1979 revolution begins, she decides to remain with her husband in Iran. However, because the family is rich and high profile, and descendants of Babak Ali Khan Valiat, the heroic “Great Warrior”, as the revolution takes hold she insists that her two daughters flee the country for their own safety. Like many thousands of Iranians at the time, they choose to travel to the United States, the land of opportunity.
Seema, who struggles with being both an idealist and a housewife, tries to adapt to 1980s Los Angeles – or “Tehrangeles”, as it’s known, due to the high Persian population (the climate and mountains are reminders of home). Meanwhile Shirin, an outspoken events planner whose outlandish behaviour opens the novel with a bang when she is falsely arrested for prostitution, settles in Houston with designer labels and a mediocre husband.
The youngest generation provides the reader with a sharp contrast in lifestyles: Seema’s law student daughter Bita, whose name means “unequalled” and yet who struggles to accept a version of herself she likes, and Shirin’s daughter Niaz, who runs away to her grandmother Elizabeth’s house to say goodbye on the morning of the family’s flight out of Iran, and gets stuck there. Niaz will eventually rebel against the country’s new Islamic regime; while Bita, experiencing all the freedom of the west, cannot stop thinking about the destitute in the country her parents left behind.
Mahloudji writes with a wisdom and confidence rarely seen in a debut, and her sharp observations are humorous and poignant. As gunmen storm the Iranian embassy in London and “Death to America” placards line the streets of Tehran, Seema languishes in California desperately trying to become more American; brushing her teeth with Aquafresh, because “the red white and blue colours I thought would work their way into my brain”, while her husband hides away in his office, “trying to put himself on a map that didn’t want him”. In Iran, a country respectful of family history and status, the Valiats were somebody, but in the US, seemingly concerned only with a shiny veneer, they are nobodies.
As you would expect in a novel of migration and revolution, identity is a huge theme, but this is more than a tale of Middle East meets west. Mahloudji is exploring where identity comes from: the stories we choose to tell, and whether those stories are a reality or based only on how we perceive the past in order to fit our own agenda. Was the family’s ancestor, the heroic Great Warrior, really a villain, as Iranian gossip suggests? Was the seemingly perfect Valiat family ever as flawless as it appeared, and was Niaz actually abandoned on the day her mother left Iran, as her grandmother’s white lies and Niaz’s tentative memories would have her believe? Shirin’s impending court case is a catalyst, forcing all the women to examine the stories they have told themselves over the years, and as we move back and forth through time, they each finally face the truth that lies beneath.
Multigenerational stories of family anguish and upheaval remain as popular as ever, from Abraham Verghese’s beautiful The Covenant of Water, to the quiet excellence of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Elif Shafak’s stunning exploration of generational trauma, The Island of Missing Trees. The Persians earns a place alongside these heavyweights. It is as funny as it is moving, as perceptive as it is pithy. This is a story of Iranian women, told by an Iranian woman, and the men remain on the periphery. As the delightfully flamboyant Shirin herself might say: “Sanam joon! Finally someone has given us a voice! Boos boos!”
• The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
