THE UPROAR, by Karim Dimechkie
Hand wringers and nervous Nellies, heed what the title and cover of Karim Dimechkie’s “The Uproar” are telling you: incident, outrage, very big dog. This is storytelling as anxiety dream, a bruising conflagration where best-laid plans meet worst-case scenarios again and again. Thankfully, it’s also a great, galloping read, pointed and provocative; the kind of book you might call a good bad time.
The 150-pound catalyst is a po-faced mutt named Judy, a beloved but burdensome pit bull-mastiff mix who shares the outsize appetites and chronic health problems of most large breeds. He belongs to Sharif Safadi, a New York City social worker, and his wife, Adjoua, a part-time novelist and reluctant advertising copywriter, though they can hardly afford the organic grain-free bison kibble that suits his special needs (let alone the cramped Lower East Side walk-up to which 75 percent of their combined income goes every month).
Adjoua is also heavily pregnant, and because the couple’s unborn daughter has been diagnosed with a form of leukemia in utero that will require careful, immunocompromising treatment, Judy needs to be re-homed, at least temporarily.
Except dogs that look like small horses and tend to attack other animals unprovoked, it turns out, aren’t easy to unload. After numerous refusals and false leads, an increasingly desperate Sharif runs into Emmanuel, a onetime client recently arrived from Haiti, and fatefully decides that he has found an answer to his problems.
But when an encounter with Emmanuel’s teenage son over his handling of Judy turns chaotic, and then ugly, their altercation makes its way to the internet, where all minor conflicts go to metastasize.
In the court of public opinion, it doesn’t help Sharif’s case that the most ethnic thing about him is his name. With his light eyes and dirty blond hair — his father is a happily assimilated Lebanese man and his mother is “a redhead from an Illinois coal-mining family” — he enjoys the kind of white-passing privilege that will never belong to his Black wife or many of his clients.
But oh, what an ally he is! Has he not used his expensive master’s degree to serve the poor and disenfranchised, on a peanuts salary? And does he not adore his beautiful, mercurial spouse, even as she seems to grow increasingly distant and distracted by fond emails from her former lover, a peacocking public defender named Aberto for whom Sharif may have been the consolation prize?
Dimechkie, a nimble social satirist and crack observer of the masks that people wear, is cutting but not unkind to his polyglot cast of characters. When not whipsawed by jealousy or anxiety, Sharif is a smart and sympathetic guy, though he can also be maddeningly naïve — an incurable idealist who continues to insist that logic, cool heads and some kind of cosmic karmic justice will prevail, long after several red flags have been dipped in kerosene and set on fire.
Considering the convergence of current cultural bugaboos on deck here — race, class, cancel culture, immigration — “The Uproar” mostly wears its topicality lightly, preferring the granular pull of human drama to editorial hectoring or lectures. What it does interrogate over and over again, in perspectives that shift and bend, is the inherent idea of goodness. (For Sharif, it might be existential — “Everyone seemed to agree it was what made him special. More than an identity, it was his right to be alive.”)
The culmination comes in the final pages of the novel, which introduce a neat, startling twist, though its sleight of hand also bears the sticky fingerprints of authorial intent. Here, Dimechkie’s coda seems to say, is the cautionary tale of how a man like Sharif lands in the doghouse, even (or especially) if he does all the things that “good” people are supposed to do.
THE UPROAR | By Karim Dimechkie | Little, Brown | 375 pp. | $29
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