BraceLand

I have approximately 50 books sitting on my shelves at home that I should be reading (because I buy books like I buy shoes) so it’s saying something that Zeitoun skipped the line.  It was worth it.

Zeitoun is Dave Eggers’ latest about a unique family from New Orleans and their Katrina experience.  Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian immigrant who settles in New Orleans in the mid-80s and builds his own painting and contracting business from the ground up.  He marries a Louisianan divorcee, Kathy, who has previously converted to Islam along with her Japanese best friend (only in New Orleans) and they have four kids together (in addition to Kathy’s son from her first marriage).

In late August of 2005, as Katrina is bee-lining for New Orleans, Kathy packs up her family and heads out of town.  Her husband (Zeitoun, as he’s known) decides to stay to watch over their house, business, and rental properties.

(Side note: it’s easy to second guess this decision now, especially for people not accustomed to living in hurricane zones, but evacuating is a really expensive, time-consuming pain in the ass, and when you have assets at stake, the urge is to stick around.  Besides, most of these storms end up passing without too much damage, and the cry-wolf aspect played a big role in keeping ppl around for Katrina).

The book tells the story of how he ends up embroiled in a Kafka-esque nightmare that highlights everything that was wrong with the W. Bush era, and which was so poignantly exposed during the Katrina response.  I won’t ruin it for you, but as you may have guessed, his Syrian background plays a role.

I’ve read a few books about the disaster that was the W era, and I find that most of them have a hard time distilling the vastness of the given debacle (torture, Katrina, WMD, etc.) into something that strikes us viscerally.  These authors have run up against the problem of trying to describe something mammoth that’s still looming—we’re just too close and the truth of it is just too obvious.

By taking one family’s experience and telling the story with an almost child-like simplicity, Eggers has gotten as close as I’ve read to translating the mammoth into something we can understand.  At first, I was really annoyed with the inanity of the tone of the book.  Eggers spends a lot of time discussing the daily ins and outs of the Zeitoun family.  There are several syrupy anecdotes from Zeitoun’s childhood in coastal Syria (the comparisons to the champion swimmer brother are especially gag-worthy).  But when the story turns to the storm and its aftermath, that tone that has so disarmed us serves to deliver us the news without bashing us over the head.  It’s almost chilling to have the facts delivered this way, simply and straight up, leaving us to see how out of line it is with the averageness of this family.

I have a strong affinity for New Orleans because my family lives there (I grew up in Michigan, but my parents lived there with my sister for a few years in the early ‘70s before moving north, and my brother, sister, niece and nephew live there now) and I spend most major holidays and a week in the summer there pretty much every year.

When Katrina hit, I mourned.  My nephew (who lives mostly with his father) lost his house and had to move to Houston for several months.  My sister, a reporter for a local TV station, evacuated to my apartment in Boston for a few days before returning to Louisiana to continue working and became the de facto New Orleans bureau chief (because she lived in the French Quarter on high ground, she was one of the only people at her station who had a place to go home to every night; the rest of them operated out of a sister studio in Mobile, AL, sleeping in a motel).  A few weeks after the storm, I caught her on the phone while she was at a strip club—the only people in town, she explained, were National Guardsmen and reporters, so the only places open were strip joints.

Since 2005, we’ve had more evacuation scares, and my sister has had another child, which makes the evacuation logistics even more fraught.  We basically hold our breath from June through November.  Four years later, New Orleans is much as I remember it, but for people who live there life isn’t yet completely back to normal.  It takes a really long time for the cable guy to come, for example.  Many people are still battling red tape in order to rebuild their homes.  Thousands are not coming back, and as much as I love the city I can’t really blame them.

Through Zeitoun, Eggers has managed to tell the story of the tribulations these normal Americans face(d).  At the same time, he holds accountable in a way no one has really been able to do before—without bluster or a heavy hand—the people who caused this human disaster.