The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

How can I have not yet read The Kite Runner, you ask? Simple: give anything (movie, book, CD) enough hype, and I'll get more and more skeptical about it as time goes on. That's how it happened with Harry Potter, which was really quite silly - I dismissed the Harry Potter books as "soft-core" fantasy, kids' lit, and wasn't compelled to read them until I was in college and saw the first movie. Similarly, the enthusiastic response of just about everyone to The Kite Runner garnered a certain amount of skepticism. I decided it was Oprah's Book Club-bait, and when it started showing up on high school reading lists, that solidified my ambivalence. I'd get around to it one day.

"One day" happened this weekend when, discovering that the second book in Asimov's Foundation trilogy was just as pedantic as the first, I was at the beach and desperate for something to read. The bookshelves at the beach house contained lots of John Grisham and Alexander McCall Smith, but the only thing I was remotely interested in reading was The Kite Runner. It screamed beach reading - in the 300-page range (easily readable in a day at the beach), floppy paperback, Oprah's Book Club-bait. Yes, The Kite Runner was what I was looking for.

And I was pleasantly surprised. As I told Husband Dan, after spending time in the genres (Sookie Stackhouse novels and Asimov) it's comforting to be in the grasp of someone who really knows how to write. And Hosseini is a beautiful, authentic writer, whose evocative descriptions of pre-Taliban Kabul are achingly poignant in the post-9/11 landscape. Having little knowledge of Kabul outside of its recent prominence on the world stage and books I've read discussing the plight of modern (e.g., recent, Taliban-y) Afghanistan, it was revelatory to read about the ethnic and cultural landscape of Afghanistan pre-political upheaval.

The Kite Runner's narrator is Amir, an Afghan in his late thirties who's lived in the United States since he was a teenager. The novel follows a fairly traditional arc: other than a brief prologue, the novel begins in Kabul in the late 1960's and follows the life of Amir. The plot is divided into three classic segments, the first of which concerns his idyllic boyhood, which he shares with his father, known to us as Baba, a prominent Kabul businessman; their servant Ali; and Ali's son Hassan, who is Amir's closest friend. Per tradition, the serenity of his boyhood is necessarily shattered by both internal and external forces, and the second segment describes Amir and Baba's immigration to the United States and the life they make for themselves there. The third act brings the story full circle, as the worldly, adult Amir must return to Taliban-bound Afghanistan on a rescue mission of sorts, where he will inevitably confront the demons of his past.

You may as well call these segments Conflict Introduction, Conflict Development, and Conflict Resolution.

Really, the juxtaposition of beautiful writing and compelling characters with nearly textbook-precise plotting make The Kite Runner a bizarre read. Hosseini, perhaps in a move indicating that he is less comfortable with plot than he is with mood and character, creates a plot so neat that it nearly undercuts the very real horrors that it contains. Amir, troubled his entire life by his betrayal of Hassan's friendship, is provided redemption in the final act when he is given the opportunity to rescue Hassan's child from a fate worse than death. I can accept this classic redemption arc; yet Hosseini layers on the symbolic parallels so heavily that it's nearly impossible to focus on the human element involved in the redemption. (At his clumsiest, Hosseini has Amir wind up with a scar on his upper lip that precisely resembles the cleft-palate scar his friend Hassan once bore. Really?)

This slavish devotion to archetypes, traditions, and motifs of Western literature is probably what made The Kite Runner an Oprah pick, and also probably what landed it on school reading lists. After all, such obvious symbolism lends itself well to both high school classroom and book-club discussion: "So what is the importance of the kite as a symbol?" ::yawn:: Yet the story itself is saturated with the wildness of a culture that is so ancient and un-Western that I found myself wishing that the structure of The Kite Runner reflected at least some of the chaos evident in a post-9/11, Bush-policy-saturated world. The tidiness of the structure and accompanying symbolism creates the sensation that the punctuation ending this gut-wrenching story is definitive when it should instead be elliptical, and it relegates what should be a very great novel about modern Afghanistan to average, book-club fare.