A NEARBY COUNTRY CALLED LOVE

A Tehran resident navigates his friends’ personal entanglements—and his own.

“Tehran is like a bad marriage one gets trapped in.” Those words, spoken to Issa, the protagonist of Abdoh’s novel, encapsulate the challenges facing many of this book’s characters. For his part, Issa is haunted by memories of his father and brother, both dead. His father was a martial arts instructor; his brother, Hashem, a queer playwright whose sexuality put him at odds with their father. This fraught family background isn’t all that Issa must contend with. When he returned to Tehran after attending graduate school in New York, he lost a teaching job over an accusation of “godlessness.” Much of the novel focuses on his complicated friendship with a firefighter named Nasser. As Abdoh writes, “a guy like Nasser cultivated the notion that protecting the weak was not a fairy tale, but rather an occupation, a religion.” That friendship is tested when Nasser meets Mehran, a colleague of Issa’s late brother. Nasser’s growing attraction to Mehran eventually curdles into something bleaker, leaving Issa increasingly frustrated by his friend’s abusive side. Nasser and Mehran aren’t the only people whose presence causes Issa to rethink his assumptions about society; old friends from his childhood and his time in New York also re-enter his life to further complicate matters. As Mehran tells Issa, “The people you thought were your friends, they can turn on you in a moment.” Issa struggles to find the right thing to do in a series of ethical challenges, even as he tries to navigate his own ambitions and desires.

An emotionally complex narrative anchored by a protagonist who’s deeper than he seems.