Boston Globe – November 7, 2004
THE SAINT OF INCIPIENT INSANITIES , By Elif Shafak. Farrar Straus Giroux. 351 pp. 
Reviewed by Amanda Heller


It is a paradigm of the new American melting pot, the Somerville apartment where much of this voluble, high-energy novel takes place, a vat in which nothing melts but only gets mulled and muddled in contact with all the other exotic ingredients.

Here we find the lapsed Muslim mer, a graduate student from Turkey working his way through every woman and every bar from Harvard Yard to Davis Square and wondering where he mislaid his identity; Abed, a scientist and worrywart from Morocco; and Piyu, from Spain, a phobic dental student oblivious to the neuroses of his Latina girlfriend, Alegre, and intimidated by her multigenerational matriarchal clan. Rounding out the menage is Gail, a depressive vegan feminist and sometime lesbian with whom mer has fallen in love, a woman more radically out of place in her native America than all the hyphenates and psychically jet-lagged immigrants put together.

Shades of Zadie Smith s multicultural carnival (the narrative even mentions someone s white teeth," perhaps not entirely by coincidence), though here it s not the polyglot characters but the Turkish-born author, Elif Shafak, whose idiom is interestingly out of register. She celebrates her foreignness with baroque flourishes of insight issuing from somewhere through the looking glass

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.