FICTION: PARADISE LOST.

Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies is a multilayered novel - auto-fiction to be exact - whose breadth and brilliance is hard to convey. In this hybrid work, fact and fiction blur, echoing the tragi-comic age of Donald Trump. What stands out in this masterpiece is the ear of the author for fast-moving dialogue with its unexpected rhythms of conversation and drama.

The protagonist, who shares the author's name, is a blend of many voices and characters. The author Akhtar's American pastoral begins in Pakistan, where two medical students in Lahore get married and migrate to America in 1968. Their son, the novel's fictional Akhtar - like the author himself - is born in Staten Island in 1972. Subsequently, they move to the state of Milwaukee in an upper-middle class, white Republican neighbourhood. The novel then tells the immigrant family's story through a son's relationship with his father at a time when truth, decency and hope are collapsing in a polarised nation addicted to racism, debt and wealth.

Recently, the Atlantic Council in Washington DC held a conference on Homeland Elegies, ably conducted by Shuja Nawaz, a former director of the council's South Asia Centre. I took the opportunity to point out to Akhtar that his novel had widened the American literary canon by including the immigrant Muslim-Pakistani-American experience, just as Philip Roth had widened the literary canon in the 1960s to include American Jews.

Shamila Chaudhary, president of the American Pakistan Foundation, said she really enjoyed reading the novel while Nawaz remarked that, with his observant eye, keen wit and brilliant turn of phrase, Akhtar was cementing his place as one of the foremost creative writers in the United States today.

Homeland Elegies is seen by some as an elegy for America, a paradise supposedly lost under Trump. But it is also an elegy for Muslim immigrants, for whom America never was a paradise in the first place, especially after 9/11. This novel shows what American life is like for people with brown skin, even if they are upwardly mobile. The novel, of course, has a much wider canvas. It explores family, politics, art, money, sex, religion and racism, as they exist in America today.

At its core, the novel is a rejoinder to the impression that Akhtar's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2012 play 'Disgraced' evoked in many of his critics. It was amusingly called 'Who is Afraid of Osama bin Laden?' by Ron Charles of The Washington Post. The play takes place in a...