Layer Cake

Through most of Birds of Paradise, there is nothing—save Diana Abu-Jaber's name on the cover—to mark the book as "ethnic." While the action takes place in melting-pot Miami, the ethnicities of the core characters are not flagged up. The central female characters are given slightly old-fashioned, British-sounding names: a grandmother Geraldine, a mother Avis, and the beautiful young Felice Muir. Felice's father is Brian, her brother is Stanley, and the family doesn't extend much further than that. Early in the book, when Avis asks about her father's identity, she's told, "don't be tedious, dear."

This is Abu-Jaber's fourth novel, and her first without prominent Arab characters. It is a novel that feels highly architected—like a giant, complicated cake—with lovely sentences, a few too many layers, and pockets of rich, strongly felt emotions. It is also a novel that, at its outset, seems to eschew ethnicity, history, and heritage, preferring instead to focus on who the characters are in America, in this very moment, in their own skins. Forget where they come from. Let's just see who they are.

The novel's compelling central story is how Avis, who bakes complicated, high-end sweets, tries to reconnect with her runaway daughter. Felice is a beautiful girl on the edge of eighteen who occasionally models but mostly crashes with other teen runaways. This is the most satisfying and universal layer: a mother chases after a daughter as the daughter runs to escape her mistakes. Around this story, others are built: Avis's failing marriage to the mundane Brian; Brian's relationships to his work, his co-workers, and his personal ethics; Avis and Brian's relationship with their son Stanley; Stanley's foodie aspirations.

Where ethnicity enters, it is largely superficial: For instance, real-estate lawyer Brian finds it difficult to connect with his bicultural co-workers. His co-worker Javier, Brian thinks, "sees no division between himself and his kids." Javier is thus more natural, more authentic, and a better father. However, in one of the weaker layers to the novel, Brian discovers that both he and Javier have hidden troubles with their families. There are no real differences between them.

Yet, although Arab-ness is not immediately apparent, there is an Arab character buried deep in the core layer of the book, revealed late in the story. Until we meet this young Arab girl, we know only that Felice has left her family—we are given no clear reason why. But, near the end, we learn that when Felice was 13, she had a friend named Hannah Joseph. This was a girl who "talked about her older brother Simon (Semir) who'd killed himself by drinking the cleaning fluids stored under the bathroom sink. She talked about it in a casual way, as if she were describing a shopping trip."

At first, it's unclear where Hannah and her twice-named brother have come from. When asked, Hannah says, "Litchfield." After this, "Felice lifted her eyebrows: almost everyone in her school had started from someplace else—usually their parents' country." Hannah clarifies only that, "Before Litchfield, other places."

Hannah finally tells Felice that her real name is Hanan Yusef and that her family left Jerusalem when she was two. But it remains unclear whether she's Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or atheist, and whether her family left for political or work reasons or something else entirely. We don't know what happened in this place called Jerusalem. Hannah/Hanan tells Felice that she's glad to have a fake American name and, apropos of that, announces, "I hate Arabs. I hate Israelis. I hate soldiers. I hate Saddam Hussein. I hate George Bush. I hate politics, I hate words that begin with the letter p. So don't ask me about any of it."

There is a bubbling violence inside this young girl's self-hatred that spreads like an infection to Felice. Hannah/Hanan's behavior grows wilder and...