Short takes
Towelhead
By Alicia Erian
Simon & Schuster, 321 pp., $22
Thirteen-year-old Jasira, the narrator of this provocative debut novel, is a walking science project, a laboratory demonstration of everything she's been taught in sex education class but hasn't understood.
In punishment for behaving ''inappropriately" around her mother's boyfriend, Jasira is sent to live with her estranged father, a NASA engineer with little interest in raising a teenage daughter and even less talent for it. A repressed and angry man, he uses his cultural conservatism -- he is a Lebanese immigrant -- as a weapon to beat down Jasira's burgeoning sexuality. Shunned at school as an ''Arab," unloved, and unable to attract the right kind of attention, Jasira settles for attracting the wrong kind.
A familiar story. By making us witnesses, however, to Jasira's solitary exploration of eroticism (she devotes herself to masturbation with a gusto usually reserved in fiction for adolescent boys), Alicia Erian subverts our assumptions about innocence and victimization. Jasira's mother and father may be bad parents, but they are not wrong to worry about her sexual precocity. And the next-door neighbor who uses Jasira as a sex toy may be a creep, but his behavior is not uninvited. In insisting on uncomfortable realities, Erian troubles the waters of convention, even if she works overtime at making us squirm.
The Language of Baklava
By Diana Abu-Jaber
Pantheon, 352 pp., $23
Growing up, Diana Abu-Jaber experienced first hand the new paradigm of immigration, the ambiguous existence of migrants never more than an airport away from home. Her gregarious father's unfulfilled American dream was to run a restaurant. Feeding people signified for him the familial warmth and generosity that he remembered, or thought he did, from his homeland, Jordan.
Disappointed in his exile, he once moved his patient American wife and three small daughters back to Amman. The experiment lasted only a year. But his eldest daughter, Diana, who was 9, retained potent memories. As an adult, she would return to Jordan for a year and would come to understand more deeply both her father's sensual attachment there and his ambivalence toward it.
Her prose is gorgeous -- vivid, lightning-quick, lyrical when need be but with an acerbic edge. Her father shares food; she shares evocative recipes: mensaf laban, the stew cooked under the stars by her father's Bedouin relatives; ''poetic baklava," a visiting aunt's confectionery masterpiece; her father's rice pilaf, mjeddrah (''clean the lentils carefully," says the recipe, ''and everyone will love you"). Reading her book, we're torn between racing for the kitchen and diving into the next chapter.
Dictionary Days
By Ilan Stavans
Graywolf, 228 pp., $17
Essayist and Amherst professor Ilan Stavans collects dictionaries. More impressive than that, he collects languages. Born into Mexico City's small but vibrant Jewish community, he commands Hebrew and Yiddish (his ancestral languages), Spanish (his native tongue), and English (his second language), and is conversant enough with others, from French to Arabic, to browse their literature -- and their dictionaries -- and to have intriguing thoughts on how language, culture, and national history chase one another's tails in a circle of causes and effects.
These quirky essays (at one point Samuel Johnson drops by for an imaginary chat) range well beyond the subject of lexicography, eventually taking the shape of an oblique memoir. One piece tells of the author's touching relationship with a poor Salvadoran immigrant. Another finds him at the theater, unexpectedly enjoying a kitschy Mexican adaptation of ''Singin' in the Rain" featuring his actor father. Throughout, Stavans's writing displays the charming verbal eccentricities of a man who has been adopted by a language rather than born into it. Stavans's perceptions, too, are idiosyncratic, whether on language, literature, or something smaller and closer to home.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
