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Recommended Reading: 'Origin' by Diana Abu-Jaber

October 23, 2007 You know that I read a lot, and that I write a lot about what I read -- and I tend to write here about only the books that grab me. So I hope you will believe me when I tell you that today's "Recommended Reading" title is one of the most intriguing books I've read this year.

Diana Abu-Jaber has made a name for herself with two beautifully crafted novels, 'Arabian Jazz' and 'Crescent,' and a memoir called 'The Language of Baklava' that is guaranteed to inspire hunger (both for food, and family). Several months ago, her publicist emailed me to say Diana had asked that a galley of her new novel be sent to me, but there weren't any left (I have never met Diana, but a friend of mine is in her writing group). 

Now that I've read 'Origin,' I understand the supply-and-demand dilemma: Abu-Jaber has taken a genre formula and played with it, to great success. In this investigative thriller, the cold and forbidding city isn't Chicago or New York; it's... Syracuse. The protagonist isn't an elegant forensics expert or an irascible near-retirement cop, but a lonely oddball fingerprint technician named Lena Dawson whose bizarrely acute intuitive skills far outweigh her professional acumen. There's a serial killer on the loose, but this one is killing babies. 

                                                          

When Lena manages (through smell), to figure out that what everyone believed was simply a spike in the number of local SIDS deaths is actually the work of a killer, she becomes an unwilling object of press attention and a magnet for other people's feelings: a strangely solicitous nurse, her jealous ex-husband, her aloof foster mother, and an amorous detective with the unlikely name of Keller Duseky. Even when the tropes of suspense come to the fore (of course Lena is nearly killed by the murderer), Abu-Jaber's skillful weaving in of Lena's yearning to understand her own past distract just enough and not too much.
                                                  
In other words, 'Origin' is not an inversion or a parody; it's simply tweaked. Abu-Jaber's honest and often beautiful descriptions of a crumbling burg, its extreme weather, and its marginal inhabitants lift this book above the common level of genre.

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on October 23, 2007 | Comments (0)