Book Review: ‘The Unwanted,’ by Boris Fishman

THE UNWANTED, by Boris Fishman

Boris Fishman’s third novel, “The Unwanted,” begins with an ending. Its protagonists, a “minority-sect” family living in an unnamed autocracy riven by civil war, have just learned that they have to leave the country.

George, the father, has devoted his life to teaching “dominant-sect” poetry at a state-sponsored university, a job that, for years, has kept them safe at the expense of his dignity: “Have you wondered why we haven’t been touched?” he asks his wife, Susanna. “Because … your husband debases himself every day licking the soles” of the dominant-sect regime.

But now his protected status has vanished — he claims not to know why, signaling to the reader the start of an unfolding intrigue — and he, Susanna and their elementary school-age daughter, Dina, have to get on a raft and flee their only home.

From here, a refugee odyssey unfolds. After a number of betrayals and acts of violence, the family lands in a camp in another unnamed nation, scarred and compromised but alive. Once there, they grow emotionally isolated from one another — and, for that matter, from themselves.

Susanna worries that the horrors of the journey “should have degraded her more.” But all she can think about is whether the United States will grant them asylum, a process nearly derailed by the realities of George’s collaboration with the government, which proves to have gone far beyond what Susanna knew.

If all this sounds painful, it is; if all this sounds familiar, it is. “The Unwanted” is careful to be nuanced and ethically complex, to avoid the well-worn tropes of victimhood and challenge readers’ perceptions of refugees. With his characters, Fishman achieves these goals. Dina and Susanna, who occupy most of his interest, are prickly fighters, neither victims nor heroines.

But his unoriginal storytelling undermines the novel’s moral complication. Fishman too often hews to common narrative beats, especially where Dina is concerned: We see her sneaking away from her mother and immediately getting in the sort of trouble that will affect her psychologically for the rest of her life — and, later, expressing the resulting trauma through sex.

He also foreshadows too heavily. It’s no spoiler, for instance, to say that Dina becomes an American before the book’s end: From the moment U.S. asylum appears as an option, Fishman steers so clearly toward it that the reader hardly has to wonder whether the novel’s most vulnerable character will get there.

Fishman himself arrived in the United States as a child refugee: His family left the Soviet Union when he was 9, escaping antisemitic oppression. Both his prior novels, “A Replacement Life” and “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” are set in Soviet Jewish immigrant communities. Fishman is loose and humorous, even rollicking, in those books. His prose cracks like a rodeo cowboy’s lasso.

But in “The Unwanted,” his writing is constrained, his tone oddly old-fashioned. He allows himself some glimmers of humor in the novel’s opening — Dina’s over-starched school uniform is a “great enemy” — but before long, his jokes give way to effortful descriptions and similes. After a badly injured man named Kamil delivers shocking news to Susanna, she feels that her “mind was collapsing, like Kamil’s lung.”

Aggressively noticeable prose is often an attempt to distract readers from an issue elsewhere in the text, which may be the case here. But the novel’s central problem stems from a deliberate constraint: Fishman’s choice not to tell readers who his characters are.

At the start of “The Unwanted,” it seems as if the novel could be set almost anywhere — in the near past or near future, in the Soviet Union or the Middle East or in an alternate version of any country in the Americas. It follows, then, that the minority and dominant sects could be almost any cultural group.

But slowly, Fishman starts doling out clues. Early in the novel, Dina’s grandmother presses on her nose so she won’t grow “a nose like a Jew,” which suggests either antisemitism or an attempt to suppress a Jewish heritage; before long, though, we learn from an unnamed character that the dominant sect considers the minority sect “worse than gypsies and Jews.” Next, we get geographic hints, which eventually allow us to settle our imaginations in a real part of the world with real, known conflicts.

This is not good for the novel. Alluding to reality without writing about it in any detail invites assumption. Trying to have it both ways — the universality of allegory and the specificity of fact — impedes the reader from open interpretation, while severely limiting Fishman’s ability to give richness, texture and heft to his characters and their home, either before or after they leave.

Because he won’t name their culture or invent a fictional one for them, it is as if they have no culture at all. Being minority-sect shapes George’s, Susanna’s and Dina’s lives, but Fishman denies himself the option of exploring what, beyond marginalization, his characters’ identity might mean. All of this is highly frustrating, especially from a writer as talented as Fishman. His intentions in “The Unwanted” are plainly good; they are, perhaps, the novel’s best quality. In fiction, that’s far from enough.

THE UNWANTED | By Boris Fishman | Harper | 326 pp. | $30