Book review: What Will People Think by Sara Hamdan

It takes some guts to write a novel in which your narrator and central character is a comedian, for the simple reason that to pull the character off, you need to make sure they’re funny. Even if the novel is a parody or you just intend to send up your comedian, you need to make them so unfunny that it’s funny. Either way, funniness is mandatory. What you don’t want are jokes like this: ‘What do you get if you write a book about a comedian who isn’t funny? What Will People Think by Sara Hamdan. Tragically, that joke is about as good as any you’ll read in the novel.

You can see how the premise of Hamdan’s book might have sounded appealing to a publisher: Mia Almas is a 24-year-old Palestinian-American Ivy League graduate struggling to balance the pressure she feels to adhere to the cultural standards of the doting but strict grandparents who raised her after her father died trying to rescue people during the 9/11 attacks with the passion she feels for stand-up comedy and her Black-Latino-Jewish boss at the media company where she works. An attempt to learn more about her family history leads Mia’s grandmother to produce a blue notebook in which a story of forbidden love, betrayal, sacrifice and endurance allows Mia to learn about herself through the hidden life of her mysterious forebear.

It’s right on trend: a socially conscious female coming of age story set against a parallel narrative of historical romance.

But it’s also very poorly written. Hamdan’s writing is not just totally devoid of wit, which would be enough to sink the book on its own, but the phrasing is often clunky, the dialogue is flat, and characters who are meant to be so contemporary and unique struggle to move beyond the realm of monotonous cliché.

Good writing, and especially good comedy, needs to be able to manipulate the everyday in ways that re-orient the reader, that create jolts of recognition by making us look at the world we know in ways that we hadn’t thought to look at it before but which immediately ring true. In What Will People Think? we get similes comparing the weight of guilt to the weight of a fallen tree-trunk, we get people forever wiping away a single tear, we get a character agonising about the sudden enormous rise in her Twitter followers while TV executives simultaneously claim that they are unable to find her on social media.

In my day job, I teach teenagers. Teenagers like trying to be funny. The rule I encourage my students to abide by is: if you’re going to try to be funny, be funny. Sara Hamdan could have done with learning this rule.