“Small Kingdoms,” by Anastasia Hobbet, $29
The finest expatriate novels are less about escape than the embrace of a new homeland, no matter how brief the stopover.
“This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy,” concludes Ernest Hemingway in his novel-with-real-people “A Moveable Feast.”
In “Prague,” Arthur Phillips dropped Americans into end-of-last-century Budapest and put them to work finding themselves through an appreciation of the exotic.
Anastasia Hobbet visits the same expat instincts in her new novel, “Small Kingdoms,” but has relocated her characters to much more frightening territory. This is Kuwait, its citizens still involuntarily flinching from Saddam Hussein’s invasion during the first Gulf War and feeling the inevitability of conflict not yet resolved.
Instead of the easy romance of, say, France or Hungary, Hobbet has tasked herself with a nation that on a map looks like a facial profile aggressively thrust into Saudi Arabia and capped by Iraq and Iran.
Just try living there. Hobbet, a San Francisco Bay-based novelist who was born in Sedalia, Mo., and grew up in Kansas City, knows the territory well. She spent five years living in Kuwait and traveled the Middle East widely during the same vulnerable time she details in her novel. “Small Kingdoms” hums with the wisdom of her firsthand observation.
The stories of five primary characters — each of them drawing the boundaries and safe zones that are the “small kingdoms” of the title — are parceled out with an even hand.
Two are Americans. Theo, a San Francisco doctor who arrives with no intention of staying longer than a couple of years, is warned, “The class-consciousness here will shock you. If you’re not Kuwaiti born and bred, you’re no one.”
Kit, an Oklahoma housewife on assignment with her ambitious husband — he works for a major American oil company, as did Hobbet’s husband — is gutted by homesickness and a shy struggle with household management in a culture governed by fine-tuned hierarchy.
Mufeeda, a privileged Kuwaiti housewife, has mastered this hierarchy even while cowed by her mother-in-law and rattled by doubts about her marriage. The most arresting narrative is that of Hanaan, an Arab woman introduced as Theo’s language teacher. The relationship turns to romance, which lets us spend more time with her defiant, educated observations of society, class, war and family. “It’s an instrument of threat. Do what your family asks or face its punishment.”
The transition from domestic sociology to multinational thriller — and the tension is indeed thrilling — expands on the cultural analysis but also mirrors the roiling anxiety of Kuwait itself. Iraq is an easy car ride away. There are societal strictures everywhere and familiar threats just across the border.
“Small Kingdoms” is laudable for filling a niche that is specific but, because Hobbet accomplishes it with such detail, seems vital: the Kuwaiti expat novel.
The world she gives us at first is broadly foreign, but we quickly come to understand its limits. It may ultimately be the only novel of its kind.
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
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