Back in 2001, after the Trade Center attacks, when George Bush asked
(rhetorically, mind you, not really caring)) "Why do they hate us?", I
thought I knew because I had just read a novel by my friend Henry
Bromell called Little America.
Little America was published in the spring of 2001 by Knopf, and it
concerns the attempts of an historian, Terry Hooper, to decipher the
events of a particular year--1958--in a particular Middle East
nationette--Kurash (made up by Henry as a hypothetical representation
of other nations in the Middle East). It is the late nineties, and
Terry, now fifty, is perturbed in his conscience about what he suspects
his father has done, and, in a larger sense, what he suspects his
country has done. Henry weaves together Terry's investigation and the
events he discovers in an extremely graceful but suspenseful narrative.
I was not the only reader impressed by the package--Joan Didion called
it "The best and smartest novel I've read in a long time."
For our purposes, as we watch the Bush administration slipping happily
down the slippery slope to a very dangerous war with Iran, the gist of
Terry's story is betrayal. In 1958, Mack Hooper is sent out by the
Dulles boys (also characters in Little America) to control and
manipulate the new young king of Kurash, the grandson of the king
originally imposed upon the Kurashians by the British, and propped up
there for several decades. The British are now on their way out, and
the Americans plan to take over, using the king and his country to foil
the designs of the Soviets and the Egyptians (Nasser and his pan-Arab
League present the principle danger to American designs). Bromell is
explicit in his portrayal of American fears. In the late fifties, the
Soviets are riding a tide of success, and seem to be expanding their
influence all over the world. The Americans fear they are in a losing
battle with the ideology of Communism, and are willing to do just about
anything to stem that tide.
The young king's fatal flaw from the point of view of geo-politics, is
that he isn't important enough to stand in the way of the Allan and
John Foster Dulles's schemes. When they discuss him, toward the end of
the novel, Henry points out that they only spend ten minutes on him,
before going on to more important matters. But what Henry does, and
what the Novel itself is designed to do, is to show that to the
Kurashians, to the king himself, to ten-year-old Terry, and to the CIA
operatives in the Kurash office, what goes on in Kurash is all
important, important enough to shape many lives and much Middle Eastern
history. Because the Dulles boys think the way they do, and because the
Kurashians think the way they do, profound resentments are inevitable
and important. The answer to the question "Why do they hate us?" in my
reading of Little America was a nuanced and tragic one. I of course
thought Henry's book should be, could be, and would be a best seller.
Silly me.
There were signs that the book was being taken seriously in certain
places. Henry heard through the grapevine that Richard Helms was
reading it. A friend of mine with lots of former-spook friends called
one of them and said, "I've just been reading about your life." She
sent the book to her friend, and her friend subsequently ordered fifty
copies. But that was that. Just when the book should have hit the
bestseller list and told us the answer to some of our big questions, it
died.
I've been thinking about Little America for almost six years, so I
went back and reread it. I was not disappointed. It is an excellent
novel (Henry has a distinguished career in TV and movies--he has
written for and produced some of our favorite series, including "I'll
Fly Away" and "Homicide"; his movie "Panic" is terrifically funny,
touching, and sinister all at the same time). He uses the resources of
the Novel (character, plot, narrative technique, dialogue) in a
beautifully sophisticated way to both inform the reader and move her.
Just as a novel, I recommend it as highly right now as I did when I
first read it (and having in the meantime written a book about the
history and anatomy of the Novel, I know more than I did about the
whole novel thing). But Little America is, right at this point, more
than a novel. Henry's childhood was spent, not in Kurash, but in Iran.
I know this because he told me long ago, when we were in our twenties
and friends. His sense of what we as a nation did there, and how we
screwed up there, is informed and even-handed. He has a strong empathy
with every character and a terrific take on the interlocking
relationships they have that cross all sorts of lines and boundaries
(remember--empathy is not a bigger form of sympathy, it is the ability
to see things from another's point of view even if you don't sympathize
or agree with that person). George Bush and Dick Cheney don't know and
don't care; they are ready to compound all of our mistakes by making
the biggest mistake of all. They are eager to make it! (One source I
read that sounded plausible and even authoritative said that they are
planning to make this mistake on February 24). They will not read
Little America, but you should.