Heather Nielsen

He keeps being evoked by

That's why I say that in some ways Homeland Elegy is a kind of bizarre mirror to that because Trump is evoked at the very beginning and it's not necessarily an anti-Trump book per se, but it's anti, you know, what is the system which allowed Trump to happen is the kind of question of the book.

Yes, Kate.

Yes, I was worried just even looking at the title and, you know, the couple of lines of biography about the author, I thought, oh, this might be worthy in quotation marks meaning sort of heavy-handed writing.

or that it might kind of parade victimhood in a way that became precious.

And it doesn't.

It's a really interesting mixture of fantasy, comedy, long stretches of ideas, but even some really interesting diversions.

He gets really interested in the interpretation of his dreams.

I thought, oh, this is going to be boring.

But there's a really interesting sequence about that.

And so, yes, he kind of diverges.

And as you said earlier, there's this capacity for self-critique

as well as the critique of others, both Muslims and non-Muslims

And coming back to the character that you mentioned, Riyaz Rind, he's a billionaire Muslim hedge fund manager whose foundation, he's got a charitable foundation to make life better for Muslims, but his business is based on the defaulting of loans.

So he actually ends up rendering a lot of towns and cities bankrupt.

But he's operating just inside the letter of the law.

And a later similar example of a kind of critique of

American corruption comes in terms of healthcare.

He's got a villain, not nearly so much a developed character, but a character who is a chief administrator of the so-called Reliant Health, a corporate healthcare network.

for which actual care of patients is the lowest of priorities.