Lifted by the Great Nothing

Dimechkie’s debut is a coming-of-age tale loaded with themes and ideas. Max lives in New Jersey with his father, Rasheed, a Lebanese transplant whose mantra is “When we are in America, we are Americans.” Max knows little of his mother, who died when he was very young. Rasheed is a mostly solitary person—despite a brief and disastrous affair with a much younger woman named Kelly, who encourages Max to press his father for details about Max’s mother. Years later, Kelly writes a letter explaining the ways that Rasheed lied to him, at which point Max is already mostly estranged from his father, because of Rasheed’s racism in the face of Max’s friendship with a much older African-American neighbor. Frustrated and confused, Max leaves for Beirut to ferret out the truth about his family. Dimechkie writes without restraint, and the book covers homosexuality, racism, identity politics, and immigration. Eventually, Dimechkie’s wealth of themes gets away from him, and he is unable to give his ideas the nuance they deserve. The book is a well-written, engaging story, a bit too overloaded but nevertheless showing a writer with true potential. (May)