Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s ‘Brief Encounters With the Enemy’

NYTimes.com

In his beguiling 2009 memoir, “When Skateboards Will Be Free,” Saïd Sayrafiezadeh recounted being raised by devout members of the Socialist Workers Party. His Jewish mother did the actual raising; his Iranian-born father abandoned the family for the cause. Both believed a workers’ revolution was imminent. It was a childhood, Sayrafiezadeh observed, devoted to “a peculiar set of rules” that were both ethically impeccable and entirely at odds with the dominant culture.

His debut as a fiction writer, “Brief Encounters With the Enemy,” is a stark and unsettling vision of that dominant culture. The young men who narrate these eight stories evince little in the way of ideals, let alone idealism. They are wage slaves fueled by can-do aphorisms and ambitions — for a raise, for respect, for sex — as routine as their work schedules.

They live in an unnamed American city where factories churn out foul smoke. The nation is at war, and a number of Sayrafiezadeh’s narrators sign up to fight, though never for the right reasons. (They’re not looking for heroism so much as a leg up in the game.) What remains of civic life takes place in sterile conference rooms and vast emporiums as spiritually bereft as bank vaults.

Given this bleak backdrop and the insistent focus on proletarian anomie, it would be tempting to classify Sayrafiezadeh’s work as a sort of updated version of Kmart realism — “Walmart realism” seems most apropos, considering the chain’s prevalence in this otherwise generic world.

But Sayrafiezadeh is, upon closer inspection, neither a minimalist nor a realist. His prose has an allegorical quality that is long on evocation and short on specifics. We have no idea why the war started, for example, or against whom it is being waged. We know only that it’s been great for business. The weather has gone haywire, though no reference is made to global climate change. The accounts assembled here read less like dispatches from America in particular, and more like the existential fables of an empire in decline.

The most striking symptom of this decline is a perverse merger of patriotism and consumerism. The manager of an upscale supermarket thinks nothing of announcing the military’s progress over the storewide loudspeaker “like he was calling bingo.” The response? “A great and spontaneous cry would rise up across the 48 aisles, people shouting and screaming, customers and employees alike.”

Departing recruits are feted at parties that come off as squalid in their frivolity. And returning veterans like Wally are rewarded for their service with awkward workplace celebrations, during which they are smothered with kisses then expected to say something profound about their experience. “But of course he didn’t know what to say, profound or otherwise. He looked around at a loss, lipstick all over his face, staring blankly at a roomful of people he had only ever delivered mail to.”

The experience of the soldier in combat is no less self-consciously surreal. In the chilling story that gives the collection its title, a grunt named Luke makes his final recon mission through a picturesque valley and up onto a plateau where the enemy ostensibly lurks. “One of the guys, who worked at a used-car dealer­ship, said that if he was going to make a car commercial, he’d use the valley as a backdrop to portray things like power and eternity, and everyone said that was right, that they’d buy that car for sure.” In his elaborate garb, Luke feels “less like a soldier and more like I was going trick-or-treating dressed as a soldier,” though the gun he carries is no prop. It can kill from more than a mile away. “You hardly even had to pull the trigger. . . . It sensed what you wanted to do and it pulled itself. Poof went the bullet, and the gun would vibrate gently, as if you were getting a call on your cellphone.”

Sayrafiezadeh may be exaggerating for effect, but just barely. He renders modern American warfare as an experience ruled not by valor but by disassociation. Troops wave at planes overhead, blithely unaware that they are drones. When Luke finally shoots an enemy in the distance he initially assumes his target has simply tripped over something. Luke suffers no real moral reckoning, even after he discovers the victim was struck down a few feet from his young son.

This retreat into denial has the intended effect of doubling the reader’s distress. But it also exposes one flaw in Sayrafiezadeh’s approach: a tendency to indulge the youthful alienation of his characters, and thereby to protect them from experiencing the illuminating arrows of their conscience. To put it bluntly, not much is at stake for most of the collection’s leading men. They drift along, unmoored from family and religion, and their ennui sometimes veers toward nihilism. Sayrafiezadeh can also be heavy-handed with his symbolism. In the story “Associates,” the narrator (an assistant manager at, yes, Walmart) is waiting to board an amusement-park ride called “Kingdom Coming” when he learns his friend has died in the war.

Taken as a whole, the stories cast a grim spell. Sayrafiezadeh is especially adept at capturing the desperate pathos of corporate servitude. In the story “Operators,” Zeke, who works as a phone jockey at a ticket brokerage, is so consumed with jealousy when an old friend returns from the war that he enlists himself. He figures it will take hours to pack up his cubicle; the process lasts minutes. “I was going to miss my chair,” he confesses. “I was going to miss my desk and headset. My headset smelled vaguely of sweat from having been on top of my head for ten thousand hours.” Is it any wonder the imagined glories of military service prove irresistible? How else is Zeke to impress the office hotties, captured here in 11 succinct words: “They had French manicures, they had highlights, they smelled like apricots.”

It’s no accident that the most sympathetic character in the book has a disfigured arm that disqualifies him from the military. Instead, he cleans up spills in an upscale grocery store and absorbs the condescension of his bosses. What marks him as heroic isn’t his rank, but his capacity to recognize the sinister splendor of the world around him. “It had never snowed in September,” he observes. “It hardly ever snowed in October. When I exited the supermarket, the flakes were fluttering in the parking lot lights as if suspended on invisible wires.”

Through an act of rebellious mercy, this character winds up with the girl of his dreams — a pampered kleptomaniac — and when the war comes, he’s promoted to a job serving coffee. This may be as happy an ending as we can expect from late-model capitalism. Welcome to Starbucks, the Promised Land.

In his memoir, Sayrafiezadeh told the remarkable tale of a childhood steeped in doomed dogma. His stories, despite their meandering plots and feckless heroes, offer something more: a searing vision of his wayward homeland, delivered not in the clamoring rhetoric of a revolutionary, but in the droll monologues of young men who kill because they lack the moral imagination to do otherwise.

Steve Almond is the author, most ­recently, of the story collection “God Bless America.”