Home Is Where the Hedgerow Is

Though its sincere title, if it promises anything, promises sentimentality, Hisham Matar’s new novel, My Friends, tries to serve a more refined taste for preciousness. The qualities are surely related, but precious writing enjoys ambiguity, and withholds bigger gestures, never making you cry but making you suspect there is something to be cried over if it could be properly considered. The precious novel does consider a great many nuances of feeling, interpretations of the same event, and perennial questions that its author will usually find unanswerable. There can be no epiphanies, because those have a way of shattering delicate objects and changing the whole view of things, such that earlier musings look like folly. There can be almost no humor, and little cleverness, because cleverness is for students, not serious novelists. The surfaces cannot be too beautiful or detailed because the precious novel wants to get on to something about the oceanic currents under the gentle waves, and because the precious novelist doesn’t have that kind of talent anyway.  The precious novel is not trying to show off how clever its author is, or how beautifully he or she can write, or trying to make you laugh or cry, so it can only demand one thing: look how thoughtful I am.