Book Review: Zeitoun

Though written with the same photorealism intensity of What Is the What, Eggers' 2006 bestseller about one of the lost boys of Sudan and similarly derived from hundreds of hours of taped interviews--the same technique that made his previous work such brilliant, believable fiction--this work is not a novel. Zeitoun may read like a novel and feel like a novel, but it isn't. This time Eggers is letting the truth speak for itself.

Hard-working, idealistic Zeitoun is an utterly likeable central character, a Muslim from Syria who's started a prosperous painting company in New Orleans, where he lives with his partner and wife, Kathy, and their four kids. The Zeitouns have clients and properties all over town, and because their company logo consists of a paintbrush spreading a rainbow of color, they have a disproportionate number of gay clients. While Kathy and the kids are trapped in traffic trying to flee from Hurricane Katrina with thousands of others, Zeitoun has decided to stay in New Orleans, to protect his properties, to guard, to repair, to be useful to Allah. Now their phones are dead. Zeitoun has vanished.

The nightmare of being separated by Hurricane Katrina is just the beginning of this family's ordeal, as the brutality of nature gives way before human ignorance. Zeitoun and three other survivors are accused of being al Qaeda, stripped of their rights and thrown into a small cell in a makeshift FEMA prison that mysteriously began construction the day after Katrina hit, while people were still waving in terror from their rooftops, begging for rescue. Given meals of pork and ham that they can't eat and warned to never, ever touch the cell's cyclone-fence walls, Zeitoun is subjected to yet another Bush legacy: incarceration without proof or trial or even phone call. If this were only a novel, you could dismiss it as being morally alert, well-meaning and good-hearted, but deliriously far-fetched and over-the-top. If only, if only.

Eggers' exposure of the vastly exaggerated, often completely invented, FEMA accounts of looting and terrorism--among the arrested are a man in his company uniform dragged from a company truck, a woman inside her home re-arranging furniture--results in a simmering rage that consumes the second half of the book. Instead of being about the damage wrought by Katrina, an uncontrollable force of nature, this work turns out to be about the damage wrought by American anti-Muslim prejudice and by the hasty, careless, greedy human beings in the rescue business.--Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: A horrific story of anti-Muslim prejudice and damage wrought not by a hurricane but by our government and by greed.