THE SISTERS, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
“Jonathan Franzen should be slaughtered!” a minor character suggests in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s quite major new novel, “The Sisters.”
“Five hundred kronor says you haven’t read Franzen,” his friend replies, which — meouch!
Franzen’s “The Corrections” came out right before 9/11 and was 568 pages: one of the last big honking literary blockbusters, with its Norman Rockwellish cover. “The Sisters,” which is 638 pages and is also familial-themed, probably won’t make the same noise, what with the Great Shortening of the American attention span.
But one gawps nonetheless at its breadth and ambition. It’s a transnational tour de force that squeezes and expands time like an accordion, or a pair of lungs.
The modernists famously wrote novels that covered a 24-hour span. (Happy Dalloway Day to those who celebrate.) Khemiri did this too with “I Call My Brothers,” a short book about a Stockholm man’s reaction to a terrorist bombing that he adapted into a play.
He divides “The Sisters,” his sixth novel and his first written originally in English, into seven sections covering diminishing time spans, from the entire year of 2000, starting with a Y2K party in Stockholm filled with “quasi-creative boring middle-class people,” to a mere minute of 2035, when someone important dies in New York.
As in “King Lear,” “The Cherry Orchard,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Hannah and Her Sisters” and all those 1940s singing groups, there are three sisters here, the Mikkolas, and they take a while to come into focus.
At the party, Ina, 24, the eldest and most responsible, hangs back, having memorized the bus schedule to leave, and meets Hector, her future husband. Evelyn is 21, a dimpled siren and storyteller Ina worries will steal him. And 19-year-old Anastasia is, as the youngest is often stereotyped, a creative and charismatic wild child.
Like Khemiri, the Mikkolas are half Swedish, half Tunisian, facing the discomforts of being uncategorizable in a fairly homogenous society. “Like Khemiri” means not just the author in real life but a character in the book named Jonas Khemiri, whose perspective and story periodically intertwines with both these peripatetic sisters and the actual Khemiri.
Both got a New York Public Library fellowship that was delayed by the pandemic. Hector founds an underground publishing house on principles of “unboundedness” and free speech; besides bashing Franzen, its leaders vow to scorn “tiresome contemporary language experiments written by posers like Khemiri.” (The writer’s first novel, “One Eye Red” was indeed a language experiment. His second, “Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger,” also had a narrator with his name. )
The line between fiction and autobiography is no longer merely bleeding; it has begun to gush. Should we alert the author-authorities?
And yet this hefty if not quite Knausgaardian novel’s depiction of so many people’s everyday lives — prolonged stretches between dramatic events like a plane crash or a paternity question or an overcrowded Edward Said lecture — is the opposite of solipsistic.
The narrative wellspring of “The Sisters” is a generational mystery. The Mikkolas’ mother, a dealer in handwoven carpets, believes she and her daughters are cursed to lose everything they love and value. Starting with their father, a keytar (guitar plus keyboard) player who, the story goes, died, “snip snap,” of bone cancer.
She moves the family frequently, trying to outrun the hex, and the girls bitterly resent this lack of stability. Supposedly their paternal great-grandfather was one of the ironworkers pictured in “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” the vertiginous photo made during the construction of Rockefeller Center, and the young women’s quest to investigate is one of the book’s grounding story lines.
Meanwhile, Jonas’s father has struck out at various business ventures — “everyone in this country seemed able to make money except him,” he thinks — and gets by as a subway driver, bartender and cleaner, emotionally abusing his son. He forces a buzz cut on Jonas at age 11; he’s ashamed when he starts work in a clothing store.
Jonas’s unfortunate legacy is depression, which manifests in his adult brain as an evil, taunting inner voice he calls the Hyena. A therapist, and writing, help him work through it. “I enjoyed turning my father into a story,” Jonas realizes, “somehow it gave me power over him, it seemed like the only power I had.”
And while Hector’s house is just fine with feminist rape porn, it has the audacity to turn down Anastasia’s “The Ticking Curse: A Carpet Seller’s Memoirs,” drawn from her mother’s notebooks.
Perhaps “The Sisters” is the next best thing?
With its accumulation of small, logistical details of life — meals, sleep, sex, transportation, the bathroom, excursions, paperwork, rules, differences in electrical outlets — “the American ones resembled a sad face with two squinting eyes above and a sad, disappointed mouth below” — it demands, and delivers.
THE SISTERS | By Jonas Hassen Khemiri | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 638 pp. | $30
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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