Fatalism and dread, mollified by irony, stretch across these stories like a scrim of smoke from distant wildfires. Said Sayrafiezadeh’s narrators are aware that little good can come from their situation and are pleasantly surprised on those rare occasions when proven wrong.
The American author writes in sparse, thoughtful sentences constructed from the narrators’ physical and emotional surroundings. In “Scenic Route” the protagonist recalls the happy early days and the growing fissures between him and his girlfriend as they drive cross country on a vacation they cannot afford. He records the banality of the biz-speak they encounter and the boredom it echoes. The kid in customer service is “reading off a script from somewhere inside his head.” Only slowly grows the realization that the couple are traveling a near-future America where politics have turned even uglier.
Originally published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, the stories collected in American Estrangement are told with a subtle sense of anticipation from lives suspended between hope and resignation.
