In many ways John Macmillan, the protagonist of Pico Iyer’s new novel Abandon, is your standard grad student. He spends most of his time slogging in front of a computer. But John isn’t studying something sturdy and wholesome like, say, neurobiology or economics. He’s studying Sufism, and particularly Rumi, the thirteenth-century mystic poet whose translated works have become bestsellers in America.
A steady diet of such exotic fare might addle anyone’s head. And some sort of cognitive meltdown seems like the kindest explanation for the string of invisible adventures and epiphanies John spends the next several hundred pages haring after.
First, there’s that stalled thesis. John keeps suspecting his footnoted musings aren’t much more profound than the thriving Rumi greeting-card industry. And he keeps hearing rumours of a fabulous old Sufi text that may or may not exist, and may or may not have been smuggled out of Iran after Khomeini’s Revolution. Most problematically, he’s got mixed up with a woman named Camilla Jensen, who seems somehow connected to his other quests. She may also be the most irritating character ever to grace the page, but set that aside for a minute.
Abandon isn’t a thriller, and Iyer loses ground when he tricks it out as one, with mysterious blondes and priceless foreign manuscripts. Sefadhi, John’s thesis adviser, just needs a cigarillo and a diamond tiepin to be at home in a Bogart noir. Except John’s biggest worry isn’t a midnight assassin but a looming thesis deadline, and neurotic Camilla is a bad fit in the Bacall mould. Iyer may be aiming to overturn stereotypes and preconceptions, but that only works if you show something underneath.
Iyer is a talented writer, and his novel’s psychological setting—the no-man’s-land between California, where religion is a PR gimmick, and Iran, where it can be a death sentence—is worth pondering (“now more than ever,” “in the wake of the events of,” etc.). But the heart of the story is John’s growing self-realization, his gradual “abandonment” to the ineffable Other. Let me remind you “ineffable” means “incapable of being uttered.” We mostly have to take Iyer’s word for it that anything’s actually going on behind the drawn-out emotional tension and poetically fraught observations.
Which brings us to John’s high-maintenance muse. Iyer has said Camilla’s character is a nod to the Sufi theme of the “hidden liberator,” the idea that enlightenment can come from the unlikeliest places. But with a hurdle like Camilla to pass, the best-intentioned seeker might be forgiven for deciding to wallow in worldly ignorance a while longer. She’s a grown woman, attractive, intelligent, but she greets John on their fourth meeting with a card reading, “I’m sorry in advance if I disappoint you. I disappoint myself, every day, every moment.” When she’s not on about her innate horribleness, it’s her unhappy childhood. And that’s about the end of Camilla. Only Iyer keeps assuring us there’s more, and John actually manages to fall in love with her, which frankly makes one want to smack both of them.
Abandon itself leaves a similar aftertaste of grinding teeth. You peer and squint endlessly for the reward you feel sure is in there somewhere, behind the overreachings and evasions and exhausting internal roundabouts. It’s a little like Iyer’s descriptions of the mystic’s quest for fulfillment. But nowhere does Iyer, or anyone, describe such a quest as fun.
