book review: salt houses
I finished Hala Alyan's Salt Houses with a bone-weary, hollowed-out feeling of having lived many lives. In this way, the book is a gift — Salt Houses effortlessly expands and contracts time. A single moment lasts minutes, yet an hour of reading whisks you through ten years. How does she do it?
Part of it, I think, is through character and structure. Hala Alyan's debut is a multigenerational novel that begins with the wedding of Alia Yacoub, a young headstrong Palestinian girl, and Atef, her brother's best friend. The family fled Jaffa to Nablus in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (the War of Independence in Israel). The matriarch, Salma, has built a new life for her children despite their loss.
Months after Alia's wedding, the 1967 War breaks out, and the family is uprooted yet again. Atef and Alia's brother, Mustafa, are swept up into Israeli prisons like so many other mosque-going Palestinian men, and Alia stays in Kuwait with her sister. She is soon joined by Atef — but Mustafa never makes it out.
Alia herself becomes a matriarch, with three children and then three grandchildren, each travelling further and further away from home, all trying to come to grips with what it means to be in exile.
The book follows the Yacoub family from the 1940s to the 2010s — each chapter is from the point of view of a different family member, in a different year, in a different location. We see Alia's point of view as a young mother and an old grandmother; her daughter Riham as a little girl; and her granddaughter Manar as a young woman. But the story is told from a third-person narrator whose attention to place and emotion are paramount; every flower and dress and breeze has meaning, each spoken word feels genuine.
What I loved about this book: the way Alyan invests us in the characters in such a short amount of time. There was no dramatic plot or mystery unfolding; this novel was kind of a "slice of life," of a very particular kind of life, and despite that, I was always drawn back to the page on the strength of the characters. I loved their humanness — Alyan writes not quite "strong" women, but complicated and dynamic women full of fears and longings, all heartrendingly detailed.
What Alyan shows so masterfully in this book is all the complicated ways love can manifest. How fights begin and end; how small acts of kindness can mean everything; how desires clash and how sometimes they resolve, and sometimes they aren't, but that the love persists.
For the most part, Salt Houses feels like a nuanced portrayal of what has, for many of us, been boiled down to talking points and news clips. We see an intimate lived experience — not just the horrors of war, but the routines and details of everyday life.
But what this book is not is an exploration of the worst that has come out of the Israel-Palestine conflict or any other conflict in the Middle East. None of the characters ever see a refugee camp, and few of the characters are harmed physically by violence. The Yacoub's are wealthy, and they are able to move to a large house in Nablus; in Kuwait, Alia has a maid.
Instead, Salt Houses is concerned with the psychological toll of uprooting, of exile, of lost identity, and of intergenerational memory. As Alyan herself puts it — "how different things get inherited ... and how things get lost." Alia and Atef struggle with the ghost of Mustafa, whose body is never recovered. Riham, Alia's older daughter, copes with the gruesome memories of the wounded refugees, to whom her doctor husband opened their home. Manar, Alia's granddaughter, wonders: How she can call herself Palestinian when she has never stepped foot in Palestine? How do you explain to someone that you have lived all your life in Lebanon but are not Lebanese? How do family secrets and past violence weigh in the imaginations of younger generations? And how does constant yearning for a home you will never return to affect how you see yourself?
These are important questions, but something that nagged at me was Aya — a poor Palestinian refugee in Nablus whom Mustafa sleeps with. When Mustafa dies and the family flees to Kuwait, she is never heard from again. This girl's presence in the story confuses me — her struggles read as a prop standing alongside the less tangible struggles of the wealthy Yacoubs.
But I think on the whole Alyan allows questions of privilege to play out on their own, without proselytizing. She shows the inequalities surrounding the Yacoubs, and allows us to notice what we will and draw our own conclusions.
Ultimately, besides its historical offerings, Salt Houses is a bittersweet testament to time and age and change, and how love makes it all bearable. It is a meditation on big ideas like trauma and past, family and identity — but invested in the minute details and the emotions that envelope them.
Content warnings for book: brief descriptions of torture and sexual assault, a moment of body-related squeamishness, sexual content.