WAITING FOR BEIRUT

A young Lebanese man living in Connecticut in the 1950s struggles with the death of his father and his sexual identity in Dimyan’s novel.

In 1951, George Lahoud is a scholarship student at Georgetown University with aspirations to become a physician and to transcend his unprivileged beginnings as the first-generation American son of a Lebanese butcher. He receives news that his father, Bayee, is dying, and he must return home to Connecticut to take over his father’s modest store, lamenting, “I had relinquished the surgeon’s throne to reclaim the butcher’s chair.” George has a violently contentious, physically abusive relationship with Bayee, a mercurial man who drinks and gambles far too much. He has no desire to take over the family shop, but on his deathbed, Bayee secures a promise from him to do precisely that, a formulaically sentimental moment in this generally overwrought novel. George is secretly gay, but now that he’s chosen to replace his father, he seeks out all the trappings of a bourgeois life and marries Eleanor Rizkallah, a plain but agreeable Lebanese woman from an affluent family. While on his honeymoon in Beirut, George is still haunted by his attraction to men and considers throwing away his new life for a man he meets there—college student Andros Seleukos—for whom he rhapsodically expresses his love in purple romantic dialogue: “I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I don’t care. I only know this: tonight, I want you. I want you and I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. If my life is only made of a single truth, it’s you. You are my truth.” The author sensitively portrays the Lebanese community in Connecticut, especially its culinary traditions; as George observes, “We were a community fluent in the language of food.” Nonetheless, the plot is tediously familiar, and Dimyan’s prose often feels overheated.

A maudlin tale conveyed in ostentatiously flowery language.