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From the Memoirs Of A Non-Enemy Combatant
Alex Gilvarry
By
Published: Jan 09, 2012
Category:
Fiction
Guest Butler Ron Fried produces TV, writes really crisp novels (like Christmas in Paris, 2002), knows everything about Balzac and can bench-press an Escalade. Well, three of those.
It takes an impressive dose of chutzpah to write a novel narrated by a young Manhattan fashion designer from the Philippines who winds up imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay trying to convince his U.S. government captors he’s not a terrorist.
And it takes chutzpah to treat so serious a topic through the prism of the defiantly superficial New York fashion world.
But this is the audacious conceit of “From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant,” a debut novel by Alex Gilvarry that reads like a compelling — and yes, entertaining — mash-up of The New York Times’ news section and its style section. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
The novel begins by wittily — but also touchingly — capturing an immigrant’s innocent love of America in all its shallow glory. Boyet Hernandez, known simply as “Boy,” is the second most-talented designer at his Manila fashion school. As soon as he lands at JFK, he heads for the Statue of Liberty:“Just like in the immigrant narratives I had read as a teenager. Oscar de la Renta, Diane Von Furstenberg, etc.”
The novel is full of these sorts of ironies, cultural malapropisms really. As Boy discovers New York, a model friend marks his guidebook so that he’ll know “how to get to Ground Zero, how to get to Saks from Barneys, then to Bryant Park.” There you have the central joke in the early going of the novel: Ground Zero is given equal weight to Saks or Barneys or Bryant Park where New York Fashion Week was held until recently. The irony works here and seems entirely believable as the product of a society that has changed since 9/11 but also hasn’t changed in many ways.
Still, if irony is all that Memoirs offered, it would not succeed as much as it does. Soon Boy’s infatuation with New York is briefly deflated when he catches sight of a secret sharer working a humiliating job in Times Square. The stranger is South Asian, and, like Boy, is “five foot one, nearly a foot below the average New Yorker.” The man wears a sandwich board advertising a cheap diner. “Had he come hoping for something better?” Boy wonders. “Of course he had. What he got served, however, was hard-boiled reality, the city’s ruthlessness, and he had to wear it every day….” Soon enough, of course, Boy would be wised up to the even harsher realities of post-9/11 America.
We know this because the novel — in the form of Boy’s written “confession” to his government interrogators — moves backwards and forwards in time. We go from Boy’s Gitmo cell to his rise in the fashion world and to the “Overwhelming Event” in which he is shackled, hooded, drugged, and dragged off to a series of appalling prisons.
Not that long after Boy brings out a collection that Women’s Wear Daily calls “a bildungsroman,” he is in a cell in Guantanamo Bay. He shouts, “Bring me a lawyer.” But nothing happens. “In certain countries this would be illegal,” Boy writes. And so the ironies mount.
The circumstances that land Boy in prison have a Joseph Heller-esque absurdity, but given the hysteria in America following 9/11, the account is plausible enough. Boy’s neighbor in the un-cool Brooklyn neighborhood where he first lives is a double-talking operator named Ahmed Qureshi, a fine insidious — and comical — creation. In their first meeting, Boy admires Qureshi’s flowing gown: “It somehow covered up the fact that underneath was a hairy, stinking man. This was fashion’s power, after all. To disguise our most hideous weaknesses.” It’s a good line that not only suggests Qureshi’s treacherousness, but also — like the novel itself — reminds us of America’s own worst historic moments.
Qureshi insinuates his way into Boy’s confidence with flattery (“You’re a businessman as much as you’re a brilliant designer”) and smarmy declarations (“Our trust is like a beautiful flower”). Soon Boy is seduced by Qureshi’s offer to be his financial backer. It’s all too good to be true. Boy knows that he’s dealing with a shady operator, but he justifies it this way: “I was beginning to think of Ahmed’s lies as just another occupational hazard. Models dieted. Writers drank. Athletes enhanced. And businessmen lied.” But, as Gilvarry understands, there are risks to this sort of easy cynicism.
As the novel continues, the brutality of Boy’s treatment at Gitmo becomes painfully clear — and the prose becomes increasingly urgent and affecting. Moments before the “Overwhelming Event,” Boy is hoping to bed his ex-girlfriend. Instead, the door to his loft is broken down by government agents and Boy is taken prisoner: “I understood clearly what the men were demanding of me. I had already been reduced to a well-trained dog, and on command, I did exactly as I was told.”
The physical — and psychological — details of Boy’s incarceration ring as true as Gilvarry’s take on the absurdities of the supremely insular fashion world. Subsisting in a solitary cell with only sporadic contact with his mostly Arab-speaking fellow prisoners, Boy is given one book, an English-language Koran. Boy, raised Catholic, reads the sacred Muslim text for the first time and it inspires this biting yet compassionate passage:
I’m starting to see why they [Boy’s fellow prisoners] put all their eggs into Allah’s basket. They’ve come from nothing, fallen into paths of more nothing, and have been put through a lot of shit, so they think: How can things be this bad forever? …Their glorious book confirms that they’re onto something special just the way the September issue tells me knit jersey is in. And so, they have their afterlife and I have New York. I got my heaven the first time around. These poor bastards are still waiting.
Boy’s touchingly good-natured response to his ordeal ultimately gives way to bitterness and despair. The novel’s final pages provide a poignant portrait of Boy as an almost-broken young man. It’s a testimony to Gilvarry’s imaginative power that by now the facile jokes from its earliest pages seem as far away as Boy’s memories of the high life in Manhattan. The novel won’t hit you over the head, but it will stay in your head.
“From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant” introduces us to a young, ambitious writer with impressive range and daring. Gilvarry demonstrates that a serious novel can also be a witty novel — and that irony did not end with 9/11.
