Who killed Zorah? Snippets of gossip expose the divisions in a migrant community in this polyphonic portrait of contemporary America
T
here has been debate lately about whether novels should cater for our cauterised attention spans. If that means narratives constructed in short chunks that can be consumed in five-minute bursts on a phone – intelligent, but with plenty of cliffhangers and well-timed packets of information to keep us coming back – then Good People ticks all the boxes.
Patmeena Sabit’s debut is constructed from a chorus of short testimonies – none more than a few pages, some just a few lines – about the death of Zorah Sharaf, an Afghan American teenager who has drowned in a canal at the wheel of the family car. We hear from family, friends and those in the wider community – neighbours, teachers, schoolmates, journalists, the guy who found the body – as well as those involved in the investigation (though very little from the police), and bites of media commentary. A picture slowly forms of a devastated family, but what kind of family was it? Versions are multiple and contradictory. The Sharafs are perfect, loving, tight-knit. They are dangerously dysfunctional.
The novel is, in essence, a crime mystery in which a community turns detective and puts a grieving family on trial. It is also a sharp portrait of an immigrant community in the modern United States, an anatomy of poisonous gossip and a commentary on wider societal divisions. Most of all, though, it is awfully addictive.
