Susanna, George, and their eight-year-old daughter, Dina, have been lucky, so far, in these four years since war broke out in their country. Even as their fellow "minority-sect" neighbors and classmates are murdered or imprisoned, George’s loyal work teaching "dominant-sect" literature has kept them fed and protected. But then the day comes: the university fires George—despite his years of collaboration, he is no longer safe. Left without money or allies, it is time for the family to run. Embarking on a harrowing trip through refugee camps and across the sea, both George and Susanna are forced in their own ways to make sacrifices to keep Dina safe, while Dina fights to understand the chaotic world crashing down around her. But with each member of the family struggling to survive in circumstances beyond their control, lies and betrayals multiply until it seems impossible for any of them to reach across the abyss.
Careful to be nuanced and ethically complex, to avoid the well-worn tropes of victimhood and challenge readers’ perceptions of refugees. With his characters, Fishman achieves these goals ... But his unoriginal storytelling undermines the novel’s moral complication. Fishman too often hews to common narrative beats ... He also foreshadows too heavily ... Aggressively noticeable prose is often an attempt to distract readers from an issue elsewhere in the text, which may be the case here. But the novel’s central problem stems from a deliberate constraint: Fishman’s choice not to tell readers who his characters are ... All of this is highly frustrating, especially from a writer as talented as Fishman. His intentions in The Unwanted are plainly good; they are, perhaps, the novel’s best quality. In fiction, that’s far from enough.
A powerful allegory for why...surrender is the default posture of humanity ... The cruelties that Fishman inflicts upon his protagonists also extend to his readers. He is nearly unsparing in his descriptions of violence, odors, body horror, and sexual assault. He jumps erratically from scene to scene, time period to time period, and character to character, often omitting details that could help the transitions feel less jarring. And then, in the final third of the book, he almost completely abandons two of the family members who have, up to that point, shared equally in the narrative ... This is clearly intentional; it offers us a shared experience of fear, disgust, anger, disorientation, and loss. It is thus an appreciable objective. It is unlikely, though, that many readers will find that the opportunity to have the meagerest taste of these characters’ experiences is worth the cost to narrative clarity ...
The same cost-benefit analysis might be applied to Fishman’s anachronistic approach to the setting ... These experimental missteps aside, Fishman is a journeyman novelist who knows how to keep a narrative moving. He is especially adept at ensuring all of Chekhov’s guns get brandished, if not fired ... The author also makes good use of his decision to write from three dominant perspectives. This approach offers opportunities for some clever twice-and thrice-told revelations and prompts the reader to reflect on the fallibility of memory, the unpredictability of motives, and the limitations of perception. However, it also leaves George, Susanna, and Dina less developed than each character might be in a story with a more singular perspective ... Fishman’s skill and experience...suggest that these challenges are features, not bugs. And his shrewd and soaring prose may, for some readers, render these subjective flaws moot. It’s true that some of Fishman’s choices yanked me from a mesmeric reader state, but so too did lines that I simply found so clever, compelling, politically astute, and philosophically poignant that I could not help but step back into consciousness to scribble a note. Other readers who also happen to be writers may be similarly afflicted; Fishman is that good with his pen.
