For the women of the once-illustrious Valiat family, post-revolution life has sunk to a new low. Tehran-born Shirin Valiat, now a Houston-based event planner, has been arrested for attempted prostitution while on her annual family holiday in Aspen. “You’re a jerk, Auntie,” Shirin’s niece Bita tells her, after bailing her out of jail. “This is bad, even for you.”
The crisis sets in motion this clever cross-cultural saga from debut novelist Sanam Mahloudji. As well as threatening the family’s upper-class veneer in America and Iran, Shirin’s arrest forces three generations of Valiat women to confront a history fractured by political, social and personal upheaval.
According to Iranian-born American Mahloudji, a similar necessity compelled her to write The Persians. “It felt like a life-or-death thing. I had to grapple with family. I had to grapple with the people I came from.” And while the fictional Valiats might not be Mahloudji’s people, there’s a pragmatic and even affectionate familiarity in her depiction of them – in particular, of her wealthy female protagonists.
“The Prada Mahda, as we say, the Chanel Pahnelle, the rhyming, it’s all an act, pretend,” Shirin tells us. “The poets – those seers – aren’t separate from me and Mommy. We are born artists, us Persians, born dreamers. Even if we express it in high finance or dentistry.”
Shirin’s cultural claims aren’t entirely overblown. The origins of the Valiat family wealth lie with the men of the family– from her great grandfather, a man questionably revered by his descendants as a pre-revolution Iranian patriot – but the dynasty’s modern energy lies in its proudly female contingent.
The regal and still-beautiful Elizabeth is the Valiat matriarch and Shirin’s mother; she has remained in Iran despite the shock of the 1979 revolution. Elizabeth lives alone in her formerly grand Tehran apartment, visited occasionally by her Islamic law-breaking granddaughter Niaz, the child Shirin controversially chose to leave when she fled.
Then there’s Seema, Shirin’s quiet older sister, an idealist who escaped Iran carrying a velvet drawstring purse filled with diamonds – and her daughter Bita, now a New York-based law student looking for meaning by giving away her inherited wealth.
The five women are the novel’s narrators, each unpicking past and current hurts in alternating chapters. For Elizabeth, it’s a history soured by lost love and a youthful decision to comply with her father’s traditional expectations. For her daughters, it’s a childhood scarred by their unhappy mother’s neglect and then a post-revolution American lifestyle that hasn’t lived up to the hype.
“Even before this whole silly thing, I had started to feel that I couldn’t stay in Houston,” Shirin complains. “Picking up my dry-cleaning, ordering petits fours at the Iranian patisserie, bringing in my racket for restringing, everywhere I turned, there was talk. I was getting bored of everything, even my business.”
But can boredom alone explain Shirin’s recent outrageous behaviour? And where to from here? It falls to the younger Valiat generation – Elizabeth’s granddaughters in New York and Tehran respectively – to take matters in hand. Bita asks a lawyer friend to defend her still-unapologetic aunt; Niaz brings her grandmother to America for Shirin’s day in court and what may be, for all of them, a final family showdown.
On one level, The Persians is an edgy and often humorous portrayal of a family more privileged and messed up than most. But there’s no disguising the pain of exile and cultural disconnection at the novel’s heart.
“What is it based on, this supposed family of mine?” Bita asks herself. “A country that doesn’t exist. One I don’t even remember. Would my ancestors recognise me as theirs?”
The Persians, by Sanam Mahloudji (Fourth Estate, $34.99), is out now.
