Her speech is a rapid, less lyrical cousin of her vigorous prose. Sitting opposite me in a claustrophobic basement meeting room at her publisher's offices, she attributes her huskiness to a cold and hangover: "I don't usually speak in this Long Island, Lindsay Lohan voice." She's good company, serious about her work, self-effacing in a way only a confident person can be, revealing that she abandoned "flashy post-9/11 consciousness ideas" for novels, including one about Osama Bin Laden's ex-girlfriend. She compliments my "great questions" and, whether this flattery is designed to endear or not, it succeeds.
Her autobiographical first novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007), was published "when I was sorting out my issues with my parents, which is maybe why I felt it came out too soon". The Last Illusion took two years to find a publisher, with editors nervous about its magical realist take on 9/11. She's proud of it, feels affection for her characters and has three feathers tattooed on her hand in homage to its chief protagonist, Zal: "All the characters are to some extent versions of me, but I'll never love a character as much as Zal."
In a way, they're old friends: "In America, my father read me stories from the Shahnameh. For Iranians, it's an epic like the Old Testament meets The Canterbury Tales meets The Odyssey. Every household has a volume." The legend of Zal, an albino who's rejected by his parents and raised by the Simorgh, a giant, mythical bird, made such an impression on Khakpour that she always knew she'd eventually adapt the story. The original Zal grows up to be a warrior whereas Khakpour's protagonist, whose mother keeps him in a cage surrounded by birds for the first decade of his life, is rescued and raised subsequently in New York by an American scientist.
Far from home, suppressing his longing to fly and eat insects, Zal's is a quest for acceptance into which Khakpour channelled her own immigrant experiences. In the two years leading up to 9/11, Zal gets his own apartment, has first encounters with alcohol, sex, and Silber, a magician who wants to "disappear" the World Trade Centre. "Silber is in part based on David Copperfield whose disappearing of the Statue of Liberty in 1983 was one of the first things I saw on TV," Khakpour says. "Silber faces the storyteller's dilemma: 'What is my work about?' Authors are often expected to be idiot yarn spinners, pure, creative people who can't think critically about their work, but I think it's important for authors to be articulate."
Khakpour talks about many subjects, including publishing ("Is the literary world as progressive as it thinks it is?"), her disdain for the "#amwriting" Twitter hashtag ("my plan is to write less") and why recent events, such as police killings of black Americans, make it impossible to be anything other than left-wing. "The world," she believes, "has become more surreal," and she traces this to the turn of the century. Zal meets Asiya, his troubled girlfriend who describes apocalyptic premonitions, as Y2K hysteria is reaching fever pitch. "Asiya is an accumulation of my neurosis, the novel's antagonist. I hated writing her parts but so many decisions we make in the US are born of fear and the imagination. I'm writing about the high stakes of magical thinking when it's put into practice."
The Last Illusion culminates amid "the world-ending clamour" of 9/11, although there are plenty of surprises, comedy and poignancy along the way. Khakpour has written journalism about being a Middle Easterner in America but, from her eyewitness's notes to her novel's denouement, she was determined to confront 9/11 in fiction. "It's tricky to write about current events, especially one of such magnitude. New Yorkers enjoyed great wealth during the first dotcom boom, we never watched the news, but after the attacks we became news addicts. The atmosphere of unease and paranoia has seeped into this book."
There is a crooked beauty about Khakpour's shadow Manhattan. She became an American citizen in the autumn of 2001, and has never returned to Iran. So is New York her home now? "The city was always my great hope. It constantly puts its beauty in danger but, in a way, this novel is a love letter to New York."
The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury $36.99) is out now.