San Francisco Chronicle -- Sunday, November 7, 2004
Longing for belonging
Reviewed by Malena Watrous

The Saint of Incipient Insanities by Elif Shafak
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 351 PAGES 


Despite coming from a Muslim family in Istanbul, Omer, a doctoral student in political science living in Cambridge, Mass., loves womanizing, alcohol and pork products, much to the dismay of his more pious Moroccan roommate, Abed. The only vice indulged by Abed, a graduate student of biotechnology, is the slasher movies he watches to dispel nightmares haunted by women he s too shy to approach. Piyu, a dental student from Spain, is entrenched in a passionless relationship with a Mexican American girl named Alegre, whose enthusiasm for cooking is rivaled only by the zeal with which she vomits what she eats.

Throughout "The Saint of Incipient Insanities," the first novel written in English by prize-winning Turkish author Elif Shafak, she explores a year in the lives of these three male roommates and the women in their lives. The most developed story focuses on the relationship between Omer and Gail, the young American who becomes his wife. Shafak describes her character s quirks and foibles in vivid detail -- often making it easier to laugh at them than to feel for them. The half-Jewish Gail eats only chocolate and bananas, vacillates from one New Age fad to another, feeds her Persian cats a vegan diet like her own and is constantly and unsuccessfully trying to kill herself.

These suicide attempts punctuate the book at regular intervals, yet they are so breezily described that it comes as a total surprise when she finally succeeds, on holiday in Istanbul where she s meeting Omer s family for the first time. "People don t commit suicide on other people s soil," Omer thinks as he watches her drop from the bridge, "and this is not her homeland. But did she ever have one?" In a book about belonging, to be an immigrant, knowing where you don t belong means that at least you have a chance of belonging somewhere else.

This novel is not a critique of injustices suffered by Middle Easterners living in contemporary America. The three roommates discuss politics infrequently, reluctant to tread upon conversational landmines, focusing on the shared trickiness of negotiating life abroad rather than global concerns that might divide them. Omer frets about his depressive love object, Gail. Abed, watching "Casablanca" does complain about the use of the term "walking bed sheets" to describe Arabs, but he himself is constantly noticing women in head scarves, ostensibly checking to make sure that they re not mistreated, though one detects a certain squeamishness in his observations. He dreads his own head-scarved mother s visit, which happens to coincide with the roommates Halloween party. Although he attempts to hide her in his bedroom -- out of sight of the drinking and debauchery, and away from their potentially judgmental eyes -- she escapes, asking him why he s not wearing a costume like his friends, proceeding to fix mint tea for guests who have drunk too much.

It s hard to sum up the plot of "Incipient Insanities," as it hasn t much of one. Shafak s real focus is language, both as tool and theme. Omer, mourning the lost dots that top the O of his name when written in Turkish, reflects, "What happens to your name in another territory is similar to what happens to a voluminous pack of spinach when cooked -- some new taste can be added to the main ingredient, but its size shrinks visibly."

Unfortunately, Shafak doesn t always land her linguistic backflips this precisely. The novel is filled with loose, quasi-philosophical descriptions that distance the reader from the thing being described. For instance, to show a snowy backyard, Shafak writes, "The only truly pantheist in the pantheon of seasons, winter connected every diminutive entity to every other; covering earth and sky, part and whole, the small and the big, under the one and the same pure white mantle of quintessence." Reading Shafak s novel is like spending time with a manic-depressive, obsessive-compulsive friend, someone whose moments of brilliant perceptiveness almost justify putting up with her tendency to rant.

These days, novels in English by authors originally from overseas are all the rage among publishers seeking to discover the next Aleksandar Hemon or Ha Jin. At the end of "The Saint of Incipient Sanities," when Gail and Omer finally travel to visit his family in Turkey, no one wants to talk to her about "the colossal issue of Islam and women, the war on Iraq, instabilities in the world oil market." All the Turks ask is what does Gail think of Istanbul and whether she likes the food. In a moment of perceptiveness, Shafak reflects that what these people really want to know is, "How do I look from outside?"

When Shafak looks at America from the outside, the results are hilarious. In one passage, the roommates list the obvious signage with which Americans label everything. "WATCH THE STAIRS! it flashed on the stairs. ATTENTION LOW CEILING! it said on the ceiling. ... On the cups of coffee it read: CAUTION: CONTENTS HOT! And on fruits: SOFT WHEN RIPE! ... Only in America you could read signs that informed SNOW SLIDES." "The Saint of Incipient Insanities" reflects the United States, not through a mirror but a kaleidoscope, as the characters notice all the things we see too often to note.