Outsider, at home

On a map, the path of an exile is easy enough to trace. He or she flees one country, goes to another.

But the geography of an exile’s interior life defies traditional cartography. The self splits.

Many of the characters in Dina Nayeri’s second novel, Refuge, are estranged from themselves, but none more so than its protagonist, Niloo. When we meet her at 30, she has willed her world into one of orderly precision and hospital corners; she’s an anxious striver, a workhorse, a maker of lists. “Wanna show you love me? Waste some time,” her husband, Gui, writes to her in a teasing and slightly exasperated email. “Have some pointless fun with all that crazy energy.”

Once, Niloo was capable of such things. The hardened crust she has developed is adaptive, meant to protect her from that “forever refugee feeling” of suspicion that she’s unwelcome wherever she goes. Never mind her fancy Yale degree. Never mind her French and American passports. At eight years old, she left Iran, along with her mother and brother. It was the last time she experienced joy. It was also the last time she shared a home with her father. She has seen him just four times over the course of the last 22 years.

Reinvention may be a necessity for most exiles, but it does not always come naturally. The strains and indignities that come with remaking a life are what give Refuge poignancy and relevance. The world is now flooded with the displaced, and the countries best positioned to receive them are increasingly hostile. In Amsterdam, where much of the novel takes place , the real-life, far-right politician Geert Wilders makes several appearances, exploiting and fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment. Nayeri even quotes him directly: “You will not make the Netherlands home.”

Gui dismisses this blunt warning as politics as usual. Niloo fumes. Her husband hasn’t a clue what a privilege it is to lead a life unburdened by politics, unbent by the strongmen of history.

If displacement demands extraordinary accommodations of personality, so does remaining in a country run by a brutal autocrat. Niloo’s father, one of the most exciting reasons to read this book — he’s a dentist, an atheist and, above all, a hedonist, an exuberant devotee of opium and poetry and drink — feels terrible shame about his passivity in the face of Ahmadinejad’s Iran. But he’s too afraid to uproot, “unable to leave behind his practice, his reputation, his warm village.” And his opium. So the story of Niloo’s dispersed clan unfolds, crisscrossing both time and time zones, with scenes in Oklahoma, where Niloo seeks asylum with her mother and brother; in Iran, where Niloo’s father is embroiled in an impressively nasty divorce from his third wife; in the Netherlands, where Niloo’s own marriage suffers as her buried identity reasserts itself; and in the various cities where Niloo sees her father those four times. Their visits are some of the most painful episodes in the book. Each time, Niloo’s father cannot reconcile the serious person in front of him with the happy and mischievious girl he once knew, or make the proper mental adjustments to account for her maturation, her new habits. When, at 14, she recoils from his touch, as teenagers are wont to do, he squirms in distress. “He looked straight ahead, hungrily chewing his mustache,” Nayeri writes, “as if trying to calculate his real daughter’s coordinates.”

Niloo, for her part, finds her father embarrassing. She flinches every time he makes a pungent goulash of the English language, especially when it’s in the service of his excesses. “Miss, please come with the quickness,” he tells a waitress in London.

Nayeri’s prose can be rich and colourful, bolts of words prettily unfurling; it can also be florid, melodramatic — she sometimes writes with a heavy hand as well as a heavy heart. Opium addiction becomes an over-chewed metaphor for the lulling security of one’s native home. Niloo’s omnipresent backpack becomes a crude symbol of insecurity in one’s adopted country.

And Gui, clueless though he may be about Niloo’s suffering, is far too saintly. He absorbs her hooks and uppercuts without once falling to the ground.

But Refuge also has the kind of immediacy commonly associated with memoir, which lends it heft, intimacy, atmosphere. This is no accident. “My own story is similar to Niloo’s,” Nayeri writes in an author’s note. The novel may indulge in a few purple paragraphs too many. But that won’t stop many readers from responding to it with affection — and perhaps recognition. What person, in adulthood, doesn’t feel him ­— or herself ­— twisting into impossible shapes?

In Amsterdam, Niloo finds refuge in Zakhmeh, a Persian squat filled with exiles who tell stories in their native Farsi, eat lemon-barley soup and protest Wilders’s nationalism. It is there that she begins to relocate herself, finding a mirror in the “misfits with whom she shares noses and dark hair, restless fits and native tastes.”

It is the beginning of a slow awakening that stretches over the course of the novel. When Niloo’s father hears about her involvement in this den of refugees, he is not surprised. “When you’ve lost something,” he silently reasons, “you return to the place you last saw it and you search, turning that room upside down.”