In her first fiction offering since her 2013 debut novel, Foreign, Sonora Jha (How to Raise a Feminist Son) confronts the inequities inside the Ivory Tower in the astutely provoking, deeply disturbing and unexpectedly delightful The Laughter. Her protagonist, Oliver (Ollie) Edward Harding, is a white, tenured and divorced 56-year-old English professor in Seattle. His best (and only) friend is canine--Edgar, after Poe. Lately, Ollie has fallen in lust with recently hired Ruhaba Khan, a law professor specializing in the incarceration of Black women in the U.S. She's a single, independent Pakistani Muslim who chooses to wear a hijab.
The 2016 election looms. Clinton's assumed lead doesn't mitigate the palpable undertow of anti-immigrant, anti-terrorist and particularly anti-Muslim rhetoric. And then Ruhaba's 15-year-old nephew, Adil, arrives from France for an indefinite stay. Ollie befriends "the boy" and employs him to walk Edgar twice a day, expecting to gain regular proximity to Ruhaba. When FBI agents appear at Ruhaba's door to question Adil about his life in Toulouse, where he was born and raised, that hoped-for proximity draws Ollie in, quickly inspiring unsubstantiated conclusions. To then explain why Adil "lies fighting for his life," which is mentioned on the third page, Ollie opens a fresh notebook to "dare reveal the workings of [his] heart in some clumsy assembly of words."
Jha is an extraordinary storyteller, aiming her shrewd erudition and humor directly at elitism, sexism and racism. As Ollie insists that he's "not one to trifle with the truth," his unmistakable delusions, especially of (white, male, privileged) grandeur, provide dazzling fodder for a spectacularly illuminating read. --Terry Hong, BookDragon