BROTHER ALIVE

A Staten Island mosque becomes the unlikely center of an outsize conflict around faith and family.

Khalid’s bulky, ambitious debut novel is largely narrated by Youssef, one of three unrelated children adopted by Salim, an imam who spirited them out of Saudi Arabia under mysterious circumstances. Much of the story is concerned with exploring that mystery, braided around a plot about fractures within the Muslim faith. Along with his adopted brothers, Dayo and Iseul, Youssef snoops around the mosque and learns about the complex reasons for their departure and how it relates to Salim’s closeted homosexuality. Adding a dash of surreality to an already disorienting situation is Brother, a shape-shifting double who shadows Youssef, serving as a kind of animal familiar and manifestation of his mood. (At various points, Brother is a capuchin monkey, a cat, a bat, a hen, a cocker spaniel, and more.) In time, Youssef realizes he’s enmeshed in a bigger conflagration between Salim and a rival imam in Saudi Arabia who strives to pharmaceutically convert nonbelievers and leads a techno-futuristic compound in the country that’s as corrupt as it is glittering. (It’s modeled after an actual project, Neom, a planned “smart city” under construction.) Khalid has plenty to say about art, relationships, religion, and family, and he gives Youssef an appealingly wry and questioning voice. But the novel creaks from its overabundance of ambition—wanting to be a domestic novel, satire of faith, critique of petrocapitalism, myth-soaked allegory, and (in its latter stages) techno-thriller, it’s constantly in search of a center. Whatever power Brother might have as a symbol for hidden lives and alternate existences is sapped by the busy plotting. Khalid has an admirably encyclopedist instinct, but he’s set an almost impossibly high bar for storytelling.

A big-picture saga about faith that gets lost in the details.