05/24/2021
Sayrafiezadeh’s rich collection (after Brief Encounters with the Enemy) features poignant stories of characters reflecting on their parents and navigating mismatched jobs. “Audition” features an unnamed wannabe actor who “never breaks character” while working construction for his father. The actor’s confident narration masks his insecurity as he experiences “the meaning of hard work up close and personal.” Later, he takes to smoking crack with a coworker. The last entry, “A Beginner’s Guide to Estrangement,” is reminiscent of Cheever as it depicts a son trying to find common ground when he reunites with his father after 15 years. In between are more gems. “Last Meal at Whole Foods” recounts a son, whose mother is dying, wistfully observing, “Her beauty is a vexing and unresolved public issue for me.” In “A, S, D, F,” a gallery receptionist who sees “everything through the prism of the abstract expressionist’s paintbrush,” tries to stave off boredom. But the futuristic “Fairground,” about a man taking his preteen stepson to see an execution, feels out of place among the realist entries. Nevertheless, Sayrafiezadeh vividly captures his characters’ misplaced optimism, which is what makes these stories so moving. (Aug.)
"[Sayrafiezadeh] writes in sparse, thoughtful sentences constructed from the narrators’ physical and emotional surroundings…[T]he stories collected in American Estrangement are told with a subtle sense of anticipation from lives suspended between hope and resignation."
"The stories in this moving and powerful collection are honest, unaffected, yet full of imagination. Whether set in the recent past or a speculative near future, they explore moments where personal and societal dysfunction converge, in prose that punches through the page. This book’s tough poetry tells us who we are and where we are headed, with equal parts sadness, humor, and hope."
"Sayrafiezadeh captures one of the most essential feelings of the modern-day United States, apathy, and holds us to that feeling. The result is…[a] depiction of deterioration and uncertainty in a changing nation."
"Sayrafiezadeh crafts this world with subtle hands…The collection uncovers the illusion of progress in America, like the celebrity we never quite see make it down the mountain but swear we do."
"[An] excellent new collection…[Sayrafiezadeh] writes with a veteran’s swagger and discipline…[T]he collection joins a list that includes Leonard Michaels’s “I Would Have Saved Them if I Could,” Lorrie Moore’s “Like Life” and Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Dead Fish Museum” as a second book of stories that exceeds and expands upon the promise of the first, confirming the writer as a major, committed practitioner of a difficult form."
03/01/2021
A Whiting Award winner in nonfiction following publication of his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, and short-listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for his short story collection Brief Encounters with the Enemy, Sayrafiezadeh returns with a second story collection whose characters face personal crisis in America's fraught socioeconomic landscape.
★ 2021-06-02
Seven thematically linked stories that explore the lonely schisms in American life.
Estrangement, the act of being separate from a person or group with whom you were once close, is the definitive condition of Sayrafiezadeh’s America and the binding agent of his lyrical, funny, and disquieting collection. In “Scenic Route,” a couple so incompatible that they're dumped by their couples counselor try to heal their relationship by driving together across the United States…except the states are not united; visas are necessary; the state lines are guarded by border patrol agents; and as the couple progress westward, they encounter increasing antagonism, some of it generated by their incompatibility, the rest by the xenophobic land in which they once, as fellow Americans, belonged. In “Fairground”—another dystopian romp—our narrator is taken to a public hanging at age 6 or 7 or 8 by Mr. Montgomery, his stepfather at the time. Why go to a hanging? Because going to executions “was what fathers did with sons.” The hanging is in the high school football arena, and Mr. Montgomery buys the narrator a “jumbo-sized” popcorn and excitedly explains “how in his day they didn’t have hangings, but shot the condemned instead. In his father’s day, they were beheaded with silver sabers, and so on down the line: guns, swords, poison, fire.” Meanwhile, the narrator muses about Mr. Montgomery’s impermanence in his life, which is obvious to him if not to Mr. Montgomery. Sayrafiezadeh’s collection is mostly masterful and always fun, but its final story, “A Beginner’s Guide to Estrangement,” may be its most affecting. Here our narrator is Danush Jamshid, aka Danny McDade, who is nearly 35 years old and has seen his biological father only twice in the last 30 years. Now, despite the State Department’s level 4 travel advisory, he has flown into Tehran to visit his aging father. But given the fraught political history between the U.S. and Iran, and given the fact that Danny’s father abandoned Danny and his mother…well, both parties know this reunion, which is supposed to last just five days, constitutes their last chance to build what could have been a lifelong relationship. An elegy for a more united past? A warning against a less united future? A lyrical sequence of stories about infinitely various forms of personal and familial and political estrangement that we fragile humans allow to define our lives? All of the above? Check.
Lyrical, funny, smart, and heartbreaking.
"Skillful and controlled…[The stories in American Estrangement] speak, at times quite powerfully, to an overriding feeling of cultural and personal loneliness."
"A dark and exhilarating collection."
"Sayrafiezadeh, entertaining and political without being heavy-handed, is a force to be reckoned with."
"These stories combine the intensity of theater, the humor of your smartest friend, and the emotional insight of the imaginary and gentle god you might wish for and fear as a witness. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is an extraordinary talent, and these stories merit reading and rereading and rereading."
"Sad, mordant, and utterly beguiling, this pitch-perfect volume of stories broke my heart. American Estrangement’s characters are endlessly unsettled: stalked by unresolved pasts, trapped in the unbridgeable gulfs of the present moment. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh works like a miniaturist, impeccably tracing invisible negotiations between human beings—and these stories accumulate with a disquieting, invisible power."
"A haunting book, and filled with longing."
"Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a first-rate short story writer. Every sentence is a delight, and his work has a captivating, immersive quality that leaves the reader shaken and moved. American Estrangement is a superb book with a strange and subtle power sure to haunt readers long after they’ve closed the cover."
"[A] stellar new collection…Sayrafiezadeh is a master…His prose has a rhythm that is startlingly original and an intense quirkiness that catches you unaware."
"American Estrangement is Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's…best book to date…In addition to its treatment of disconnection and precarity, there is a compelling combination of realism and allegory and some dystopian flourishes—features that have inspired comparisons with the work of George Saunders"
"Arresting…consolidates his reputation as a skilled writer with a talent for creating flawed and beleaguered characters and plumbing their emotional depths."
