The Kite Runner
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Paul
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1385
rating: 3
read at: 2011/12/04
date added: 2012/01/23
shelves: novel
review:
You know those commercials for the SPCA that have Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” playing and a slide show of abused and pitiful looking dogs and cats? Everyone I know hates those commercials, and with good reason. They’re manipulative, playing your emotions without any real motive aside from gain. It isn’t that they aren’t effective, it’s that they’re so transparent in their subtlety-deprived excavation of our knee-jerk emotional response that you hate them for being so good at what they’re clearly trying to do, in part because they don’t earn it. We have this sense that we should not be moved to tears by a thirty second commercial, so when we are because of some laser-targeted heartstring yanks, we don’t admire the efficiency of the effort, we just feel resentful and call it cheap.
I bring it up because I felt that way a lot when reading Khaled Hosseini‘s The Kite Runner, like I was being played somehow. Like those loathed commercials, it wasn’t that the book was ineffective, it was that it felt like it hadn’t really earned its response from me. Admittedly, this is an awkward criticism to level at a novel. What counts as effective and well-deserved emotional investment? It’s as subjective as opinions on the quality of writing itself. Ahem.
But I think it starts with realistically crafted characters who are more than puppets, who inspire affection and sympathy from readers in the same way real people do, by having faults and overcoming obstacles and being relatable. Too many of the characters in The Kite Runner seem to exist in such a compartmentalized way as to serve only a single possible purpose. The biggest example of this is the unbelievably saintly Hassan, our narrator’s sort of half servant, half friend. In order for the protagonist to have a crisis, he must sacrifice Hassan and his innocence (a symbolism effort that is precisely as restrained as those bloodied puppies from the SPCA spots) and while the sequence is, truly, harrowing and effective, it feels sleazy and conniving as well. I’m not even sure what to contrast this to, because it seems like so few other authors would dare to stoop to the level of brutalizing a saccharine character in this way just to introduce some conflict. Those aren’t puppet strings Hosseini grasps, they’re puppet bridge cables.
The story is of Amir, the narrator/protagonist, a boy growing up in Afghanistan just before the Russian invasion in the late 1970s who emigrates to the United States as a teenager to escape the conflict. The first third or so of the book deals with his relationship to Hassan, the turbulent quest for approval from his father, Baba, and the encounter that drives a wedge into all of their lives. The second part of the book is the by-the-numbers coming of age bit, set in California. In fact, it is set in my hometown.
Let me pause here for a second and talk about this setting and the way Hosseini deals with it. Admittedly, part of the reason I even picked this book up was because of its Fremont, CA secondary setting. I know this is extraordinarily nit-picky but it annoyed me an awful lot that some of the details which are thrown in about the town are exceptionally strange ones. Not so much that they are completely incorrect or indicative of heavy license being taken with the place—I actually wouldn’t mind so much if the Fremont depicted here was sort of a fanciful version of the town I once knew more intimately than any other on Earth. The problem is that he includes really random tidbits that just feel as if they were constructed without any real research or any true local’s appreciation for what the place is actually like. For example, at one point he talks about the Indian movie theater and, contextually, I assume he’s referring to the Naz cinema which was, at one time, located in Fremont’s Centerville district. But the time setting here is the early 1980s and I happen to know that the Naz took over a building that used to be called ABC Theater which showed second run movies, double features and Rocky Horror on Saturday nights up until 1988 when it sadly went out of business. It wasn’t until the early 90s that it became the Naz, which from what I can tell was the first Indian theater in the area. You can see how someone who came to Fremont after the Naz was in place would assume it had been around for a long time (it’s a very old fashioned looking theater) and had always shown Indian movies. A bit of research could have cleared it up. Other nagging details annoyed as well: At one point he describes mapping out a route to hit up the best garage sales on a Saturday and listing the East Bay towns but in a totally nonsensical order: “Fremont, Union City, Newark, Hayward.” Any East Bay resident will tell you that with Newark being southwest of Fremont and Union City being northeast with Hayward beyond that, you would never hit up Newark in the middle of a trip to UC/Hayward. Never. It’s backtracking twice. It’s stupid. He goes on: “San Jose, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, and Campbell if time permitted.” No. You have to drive through Milpitas to get to any of those other three South Bay towns and if you hit Campbell last, you are at the furthest southern point from home. And yeah, I know he doesn’t necessarily say that was the order they visited the towns in, but I don’t know anyone who would list a number of cities they visited in a random order that way. It’s like saying, “I went to Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, and then Chicago by train.” It sounds awkward if you know anything about geography.
At any rate, the third section of the book is devoted to Amir’s return to Afghanistan, drawn back by an opportunity for redemption offered by one of Baba’s close friends who stayed behind. And if the first section of the book feels manipulative and undeservedly touching, Hosseini wastes no opportunity to exploit emotional triggers or thrust new pictures of abused innocence in readers’ faces. In a lot of ways the book feels like every Hollywood tearjerker cliché packed into one unbroken string of groan-inducing pile-on. The tortured artist hero; the journey-quest for redemption; the family secret unveiled; the surprise return of the villain; the one-last-mistake climax; the bleak ending with the slight nod toward hope; it’s all here.
In the end, I resent The Kite Runner. I resent it because Hosseini is not ineffective with his crude use of these simple tools and I resent it because the book is written in a way that makes it easy to swallow if difficult to digest. I resent it most for being so blatant and unsophisticated while having the audacity to be somewhat effective. The novel hits a lot of my downgrade triggers—apart from this cheap, Oprah-book sensibility—too: A writer protagonist (when oh when will writers look past their own self-important noses for pity’s sake?), an in-prose discussion of the prose itself (the section about endings toward the end is like one big “don’t blame me if you’re disappointed in a few pages” caveat), book-club-ready dream sequence symbolism and excessive bookending (the “oh, look what I dregged up from the first twenty pages in the last twenty pages” syndrome).
But what I resent most about The Kite Runner is that I couldn’t bring myself for whatever stupid and sentimental reason to outright hate it. As much as the book annoyed me—incessantly, endlessly—throughout reading it, I found the experience to be a sickening seesaw between my brain and my heart. All the while my cynicism and critical thought processes were deriding the book and its crass, obvious machinations, my manipulated emotion centers were loving the characters of Baba and Soraya and Hassan and Sohrab, desperate to find out what happens to them all. I flipped back and forth between wanting to toss the book aside in snooty disdain and finding myself unable to stop reading it until I reached the end. I hate that I could see so easily through Hosseini’s book and yet I fell for it completely.
Like a person who has to donate to the animal shelters because Sarah McLachlan and the sad-eyed kittens gave them no choice, I may not feel good for being so regrettably lacking in control for my own response and actions, but I can’t deny what they were. The result is a book I will never recommend to anyone but which I must begrudgingly admit I devoured.