[American War] is proof of the premise that while philosophy can urge contemplation, it is fiction that can lure us into compassion ... The world of American War is a prophetic one, with loss and privation and conflict the cornerstones. It is also a compelling one, the warp and weft of its details constructing a universe whose internal logic is as convincing as any real-world account. All of it can be chalked up to Akkad’s mastery of detail, his depiction of an ecological collapse hastening the end of human compassion, filial feeling, normalcy, beauty, and possibility ... It’s a species of fear we could do with more of right now.
...a surprisingly powerful novel — one that creates as haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy did in The Road (2006), and as devastating a look at the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America (2004) ... His familiarity with the United States’ war on terror informs this novel on every level, from his shattering descriptions of the torture endured by one of his main characters to his bone-deep understanding of the costs of war on civilians ... There are considerable flaws in American War — from badly melodramatic dialogue to highly contrived and derivative plot points — but El Akkad has so deftly imagined the world his characters inhabit, and writes with such propulsive verve, that the reader can easily overlook such lapses ... El Akkad has written a novel that not only maps the harrowing effects of violence on one woman and her family, but also becomes a disturbing parable about the ruinous consequences of war on ordinary civilians.
The reader grows attached to Sarat and Simon not merely because of their perilous situation but because El Akkad is skilled at capturing the details that make them into real, flesh-and-blood people. Working against this nuance are jumps in time as long as a decade that interrupt the arc of the narrative ... The pacing trucks on at the same steady rate whether there’s action or conversation, while frequent transcripts of diaries, political speeches and journalistic accounts attempt to add more context for the civil war. Most of the time, however, entries like [these] are dishwater dull. These sections also seem oddly beholden to the original Civil War, and not in an illuminating way ... Despite these flaws — which may register to some readers as quibbles — American War is a worthy first novel, thought-provoking, earnest and mostly well-wrought ... El Akkad’s formidable talent is to offer up a stinging rebuke of the distance with which the United States sometimes views current disasters, which are always happening somewhere else. Not this time.
...a most unusual novel, one featuring a gripping plot and an elegiac narrative tone, but also an oppressively grim vision of a divided, self-destructive nation that becomes a victim of its darkest impulses and actions ... Were Americans forced to endure such horrors, El Akkad thought-provokingly implies, their reactions would resemble those of the foreigners whose anguish and anger today can often seem strange and inexplicable from a distance ... Cynicism has always informed dystopian fiction, but this novel’s quotient is shockingly high ... Although El Akkad’s American War frequently employs too heavy a hand, the novel offers a searing indictment of jingoism, whatever its ideological hue. And it provides yet one more example of how an outrage such as Guantanamo-style torture sets the revenge cycle spinning.
The American War he creates is an unsettling amalgam of 19th-century hatred and 21st-century technology: the War Between the States amplified by the wonders of modern engagement to claim tens of millions of victims ... El Akkad demonstrates a profound understanding of the corrosive culture of civil war, the offenses that give rise to new hypocrisies and mythologies, translating terrorists into martyrs and acts of despair into feats of heroism ... this story is always Sarat’s. El Akkad has done nothing less than reveal how a curious girl evolves into a pitiless fighter. Her change appears subtle month to month, but shocking by the end ... perhaps most relevant is the way El Akkad re-creates the rhetoric of factional righteousness, the self-validating claims of the aggrieved that keep every war fueled.
...intense, imaginative, and tragic ... Akkad is occasionally heavy-handed, and the brutality of the 'Sugarloaf' detention center—his Guantanamo stand-in—is as subtle as a chainsaw ... Akkad’s worldbuilding has two flaws. First, fossil fuel is basically a Macguffin in that it doesn’t noticeably impact the story, but readers are expected to accept it was worth this second Civil War...Second, there is a lack of creativity in presenting the secessionists as the South, once again refusing to give up what they consider a vital part of their life ... Nevertheless, this intense novel takes recent foreign history and reimagines it happening to us in America, and it is successfully disconcerting. You learn something from a story that asks you to consider a dark, strangely-plausible abyss; you learn where your own loyalty has fallen away, like Akkad’s disappearing coastlines.
...a vision of approaching ruin that doubles as a sharp critique of current American foreign policy ... American War is not a subtle book, and Mr. El Akkad is using the future to make a blunt point about the present. By substituting defiant Southerners for Muslim fundamentalists, he seeks to make the victims of the 'War on Terror' more recognizable and the blowback more coherent ... Yet the parallels only stretch so far. Somehow neither race nor religion figures into this civil war, which makes the implied connections between Confederate rebels and jihadist insurgents superficial at best ... Even so, American War is a provocative thought experiment and a rewarding conversation piece.
There’s a fair amount of authorial winking and seat-of-the-pants science going on here, but never mind; El Akkad is far less concerned with the mechanics of his conceit than its psychological underpinnings ... the novel’s thriller premise notwithstanding, El Akkad applies a literary writer’s care to his depiction of Sarat’s psychological unpacking and the sensory details of her life, first in Camp Patience, then on the move as a freelance insurgent ... Whether read as a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok, an allegory of past conflicts or a study of the psychology of war, American War is a deeply unsettling novel. The only comfort the story offers is that it’s a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.
Although he sets American War in the future, El Akkad has his vision fixed squarely on current events. Waterboarding, rendition, extreme interrogation, rising coastlines and domestic terrorism all play their part in the story. But American War avoids becoming a polemic. Its characters are too vivid and contradictory, its twists of plot too well constructed, for the novel to settle for familiar and obvious messages … Nobody enters the world a soldier, but El Akkad doesn’t shrink from delineating how easily they can be created. The Chestnuts are wrecked by the war, and the nation itself will pay a heavy price for their destruction. As the initially unidentified narrator says, ‘This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin.’
This is not a comforting political message for Americans, whose homeland has largely remained free of the chaos and bloodshed experienced by other nations in the modern age. But comfort is exactly what El Akkad is writing against. Sarat sees safety as 'just another kind of violence — a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?' What if it happened here? American War asks us to imagine the uncomfortable.
[Certain lines] reveal the biggest problem with American War, one common to Dystopian novels: It has to speak the language of oppression and resistance, which is usually stiff, bureaucratic and militaristic. Great for rallies, tough on novels. But El Akkad, an Egyptian-born journalist who’s covered the war on terror, has a knack for giving that material as much of a heartbeat as possible. His imagined speeches, transcripts, history-book passages, censored letters and news stories feel accurate while highlighting institutional deceptions and omissions. Better, El Akkad clears plenty of space for human-scale storytelling amid the geopolitical scaffolding ... There are few glimmers of humor, though, or even much of the optimism that most Dystopian tales gesture toward in their final pages.
Never mind the obvious allure of this bold debut novel’s cracked-mirror patterning on our present moment. With dystopian stories, the frisson of partial recognition can only sustain so much attention; what matters more is the capacity of plot and character to do more than merely fill out a clever premise. Despite some busy and overdone elements — a pseudo-academic framing of the main story and frequent reportorial inclusions of background information — American War commands our attention by focusing it on the trials of one Sara T Chestnut … El Akkad smartly makes it hard, near the novel’s culminating event, to line up political imperatives and personal motives. It is the humane view of this consuming novel that ‘in some circumstances, even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness.’
The mission of Omar El Akkad’s first novel, American War, is admirable: to encourage western readers, especially Americans, to put themselves in the shoes of the world’s radicalised displaced people ...El Akkad sets American War not just in America, but in the American south ... El Akkad’s southerners don’t talk like southerners, don’t behave like southerners, don’t seem to have any real roots in the land they fight for ... It’s hard to view this novel as the story of how an American would respond to the conditions that create terrorists in other nations because Sarat and her family don’t seem especially American ...Sarat can’t be stripped of any of those things because she never really has them to begin with. She is a contrivance, existing only to serve the message of American War. War may inevitably dehumanise the people caught up in it, but a novel, however well intentioned, ought not to follow its example.
El Akkad, a Cairo-born journalist, has an innate (and depressingly timely) feel for the textural details of dystopia; if only his grim near-future fantasy didn’t feel so much like a crystal ball.
El Akkad is excellent in judiciously refraining from making clear whether it is Gaines’s ideology or the wanton carnage that radicalizes Sarat ... One weakness of the novel is the lack of development of Sarat’s close childhood friend, Marcus Exum, who departs early for the safety of the North, where he eventually becomes a Union Blue officer ... El Akkad deploys a subtle critique of torture as not only immoral, but ineffective -- and a direct critique of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture and Donald Trump’s lurid flirtation with it.
...[a] vigorously well-informed, daringly provocative speculative first novel ... El Akkad has created a brilliantly well-crafted, profoundly shattering saga of one family’s suffering in a world of brutal power struggles, terrorism, ignorance, and vengeance. American War is a gripping, unsparing, and essential novel for dangerously contentious times.
...an accomplished debut novel ... Watts’ gently told story, like Fitzgerald’s, is only superficially about money but more acutely about the urgent, inexplicable needs that shape a life.
The book takes a beat too long to find its rhythm, but when it does, it hits home—and hard. Watts powerfully depicts the struggles many Americans face trying to overcome life’s inevitable disappointments. But it’s the compassion she feels for her characters’ vulnerability and desires that make the story so relevant and memorable.
