This charming and entertaining debut novel by Karim Dimechkie tells the story of a father and a son. It opens in the summer of 1996, at which time Max Boulos is 12 years of age and living with his apparently single father, Rasheed, in a suburb of New Jersey.
Although Lebanese by birth, Rasheed is determined not to be defined by his origins. He thinks of and refers to himself as an American; he insists that friends and neighbours call him Reed; he makes a show of his love of “baseball, burgers, and expressions like howdy and folks”; he shares with his Chinese neighbours, the Yangs, a tacit agreement to avoid making any reference to one another’s foreignness; and he mentions “nothing about his personal history at all”.
Max is also devoted to his adopted home, yet he does not share his father’s desire to efface the past. He longs to discover the circumstances of the murder of his mother in Lebanon. He longs to discover how the rest of the family came to perish at the same time.
And he longs to discover how he and Rasheed (a man still plagued “by guilt about being out of the room while all the most important people in his life were massacred”) managed to escape the fate of their relatives and find themselves making a life in America.
Over the course of the first part of the novel, Rasheed offers Max an explanation of these events that he hopes will stifle his son’s curiosity. For a while that strategy proves successful, and we follow the pair as they set about leading their respective lives. We see Rasheed embarking on a less-than conventional relationship just as Max is awakened to mortality (“all things seemed qualified to kill him now”), to drinking and to sex through a series of transgressive and romantic friendships.
As these develop, Max begins to doubt the veracity of the stories his father has told him – so much so that in the summer of 2000 he travels to Beirut in search of the truth about his past. It is a journey that brings about a denouement that is first harrowing and raw, then gently, if plangently, affirmative.
There is much in this story to enjoy and admire. Dimechkie captures well the trials of adolescence, and he writes insightfully about the degradation of Max and Rasheed’s relationship.
Yet he is also alive to the comedy and joy of these things – particularly in the first half of the book. Rasheed (“a five-foot-five paunch-bellied man with twiggy arms, a scimitar of a nose, a weak chin, brown eyes that looked like little coffee beans”) is a lovely comic creation (tender, absurd, full of pain, love and vitality), and Max is written with an awareness of what it is to be a son that is evidently the product of careful thought and observation.
Elsewhere in the novel, however, there are signs of laziness. The malapropisms ascribed to Rasheed can sometimes feel cheap: attempts to capture Max’s thoughts are often histrionic and unnatural (“How could he have done this? Why? Why would anyone raise their child this way?”); there is a general tendency to reach for stale phrases (“was he just being a spastic?”); and the plot revelations are signposted so clearly (and so far in advance) that, when they come, they are drained of their force.
Do these shortcomings affect one’s enjoyment of the book? Not significantly. Lifted By the Great Nothing is an absorbing and intelligent work about death and the morality of deception that asks unsettling questions about how to live in a world that is “big, small, unfair, and sometimes beautiful”.
It is to Dimechkie’s credit that he is able to handle these themes seriously while rarely succumbing to solemnity. For at its best, this is a book that engenders in the reader something of the feeling awakened by all good writing about suffering: the feeling that, after all the pain, we have been exhilaratingly and edifyingly lifted.
Matthew Adams writes for the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator and the Literary Review. He lives in London.
