Once in a Promised Land by Laila Halaby

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, being an Arab and a Muslim in America meant being a potential target of suspicion, vulnerable to backlash from an angry public looking for outlets for its fear or rage.

In her second novel, Once in a Promised Land, Jordanian-American author Laila Halaby takes readers back to that time when American flags fluttered from car antennas and people were either with us or against us. She places her protagonists, a well-off Arab couple living in Tucson, in that moment to explore the effect on their lives of hijackers’ flying planes into buildings on the other side of the country.

Jassim and Salwa Haddad live comfortably with well-paying jobs, fancy cars and more space and privacy than they ever had in Jordan. Jassim is a water lover, a hydrologist whose passion is preservation and whose religion is a regular morning swim (“Jassim did not believe in God, but he did believe in Balance,” Halaby explains.) Salwa is a banker and real estate agent with a taste for luxury. Her family nicknames her Queen of Pajamas because of her obsession with silky sleepwear. But their place in the world is tenuous, and their lives begin to unravel from pressures outside and inside themselves.

However acclimated they are to American life, Jassim and Salwa are foreigners in a land now hostile to people who look like they do. As their American dream life is pulled out from under them, Salwa decides their adopted country is too crass and corrupt to live there anymore. Halaby describes her realization:

“All those years of schizophrenic reaction to American culture, disdain for the superficial, which she had buried with each new purchase and promotion, … it all burst forward as if she were seeing it for the first time.”

But Salwa and Jassim are not innocent in the destruction of their good life. Their marriage suffers from a series of tragic events, cover-ups and lies. Salwa hides a pregnancy because Jassim does not want children, and she continues to keep it secret when she miscarries. In a depression, she launches into an affair with an untrustworthy co-worker. Jassim hits a teenage boy with his car. Not wanting to further upset his depressed wife, he doesn’t tell her he killed the teen and struggles alone with the guilt.

These characters have a big hand in making their lives as unlivable as they become. Salwa’s choice of an office paramour hurts her and Jassim, and it’s difficult to sympathize with her as her psyche begins to crumble. Jassim is portrayed as so wooden and regimented that true feeling for him doesn’t develop until the end of the book. In a way, theirs is an American story of a strained, two-career marriage where both partners look elsewhere for comfort and understanding.

Sept. 11 comes back into the plot in the last part of the novel, and things get worse for Jassim. He is distraught over killing the boy, and co-workers misinterpret his strange behavior and report him to the FBI. When the agency launches an investigation, several unfortunate coincidences, including Salwa’s sending a large amount of money to Jordan on Sept. 12, are hard to explain away.

The book works best when Halaby is describing an overzealous government and citizenry fueled by paranoia and a desire for quick action, though some of the suspecting people, described in the book as right-wing evangelical Christians, come off as one-dimensional villains.

The book fails when Halaby, who studied folklore on a Fulbright scholarship, tries to make the story something bigger, a morality tale about the costs of leaving your homeland, leading a life without purpose and pursing things you are not supposed to have. The characters of Jassim and Salwa aren’t rich enough or universal enough to carry the weight of those lessons, and Halaby’s attempts to make them deeper often come off as clunky and forced.

What readers do get in Once in a Promised Land is a portrait of a specific marriage and a contemporary period piece that, five years later, feels a little dated.