Writing past stereotypes

LOS ANGELES - The hit 1995 teen movie “Clueless” might be known best for introducing Americans to Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd, but first-time novelist Porochista Khakpour remembers it for another reason: It injected Iranian Americans into the U.S. popcultural consciousness.

“There’s that scene when (Silverstone’s character) Cher says, And that’s the Persian Mafia. You can’t hang with them unless you own a BMW.’” Khakpour, 29, delivered the line in an authoritative teen-queen squeak. It was a “hideous” milestone for Iranian-born, South Pasadena, Calif.-bred, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Khakpour, substituting for the stereotype of Iranians as veiled women and religious fanatics another unappealing notion — of an excessively wealthy, insular immigrant community “in shoulder pads and gold jewelry.”

Khakpour’s goal was to challenge both stereotypes in her first novel, “Sons and Other Flammable Objects,” which was published this fall. Her main characters, like her own family, are resolutely middle class and are more Zoroastrian than Muslim. They reside in a kitschy Pasadena apartment complex, not a “Tehrangeles” mansion. There are no religious fanatics or veiled women save for those in the novel’s deliberately overwrought dream sequences.

Twelve years after “Clueless,” books such as Khakpour’s, and well-received works by first-time writer Dalia Sofer and established novelist Gina Nahai are putting the immigrant culture more fully into the spotlight. While the politics of their native country fills the news, Iranian American writers have been finding enthusiastic audiences since 2003, when Azar Nafisi’s wildly successful memoir “Reading Lolita in Tehran” and Marjane Satrapi’s innovative graphic novel “Persepolis” hit bookstores.

These writers’ exploration of new genres and styles — and their abilities to tell the stories of a new generation of Iranian Americans, stories that don’t necessarily start with the Iranian revolution — makes it increasingly difficult to point a finger and place a label.

Recently, Khakpour read from her book to a packed bookstore crowd, showcasing one of the things that sets her book apart — her stylized prose. While Khakpour says her long sentences are difficult to read aloud, she rarely stumbled as she presented a scene in which her characters encounter Ed McMahon on a class-envious trip to Rodeo Drive. The protagonist, Xerxes Adams, imagines drilling a hole under McMahon’s “Star Search” stage: “On the opposite end of McMahon’s shiny designer shoes, through the wailing volcanic fodder of the planet’s core, would certainly be other feet and maybe knees and maybe hands and, hell, torsos of the perpetually aching, ailing, hurting people of the other world, most of the world, that looked somewhat more like Xerxes Adams, looked at least more as he was supposed to look, that shared with him something he could never quite get in touch with but clearly had to have.” Her audience — about half Iranian American, including some family and friends — murmured knowingly.

But even as Khakpour’s excerpt made clear how definitively American a book it was, she told the crowd that some publishers had asked her to “Iranicize” the book.

“Iranian memoirs set the rules for Iranian fiction a little bit — for what types of things do well and what gets published,” Khakpour said in an interview, mentioning “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” That story — of a group of female students surreptitiously reading Western classics in postrevolutionary Iran — has been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 100 weeks.

“Because my book became successful, publishers do want to repeat that success. So memoirs are fashionable,” Nafisi said. “But behind (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad, behind Bush, there are millions of people. Americans don’t know what Iran is all about, and I think readers want to know what is behind the politics.”

As much as publishers drive the market, so do the writers’ choices, and there are a few reasons memoirs became the mode for so many Iranian writers — and why most of the writers making waves in the U.S. are women.

For Iranians, Nafisi noted, personal stories seemed much more important after the revolution, when so many personal experiences were outlawed in the public sphere.

Women in particular were the ones hidden or even erased from public life — which might explain why immigrating Iranian women felt more compelled to write about their experiences.

Nahai’s new novel, “Caspian Rain,” returns to Iran for its setting, but unlike many memoirs, it unflinchingly depicts the cruelty of Iranian women against other women, which, as Nahai noted, is often the only way for women to exercise power over other people.

Sofer and Khakpour differentiate themselves by writing mostly from the perspective of male protagonists. In “The Septembers of Shiraz,” Sofer starkly depicts the arrest and imprisonment of Isaac Amin, charged with the same crime as Sofer’s father was — spying for Israel.

Khakpour focuses on Darius and Xerxes Adams, a feuding father and son living in the U.S. Both confront American prejudices.

Khakpour cited a steady literary diet of dead white men of the Western canon and poetry from the Persian Book of Kings. She also wanted to get as far away from another much used and abused category — “chick lit” — as possible.

Khakpour and Sofer have received much attention and overwhelmingly positive reviews. Sofer won the prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award for “emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise.” Khakpour’s novel was selected as a New York Times editor’s choice, and Jonathan Ames described it as “kaleidoscopic, gorgeous, and mad.”