Sonora Jha concludes 'The Laughter' with brutality and a warning

This is KUOW's book club, and we just finished reading Sonora Jha's "The Laughter," her novel that recently won the 2024 Washington State Book Award for Fiction. I'm your club guide, Katie Campbell. Let's get into it.

A

warning up front: many spoilers ahead.

It cannot be avoided, because I'm still reeling from the ending and need to talk about it. If you've been reading along with the group, I imagine you feel the same way. If you've not yet read or finished "The Laughter," you might want to skip this one.

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I'm jumping straight to the finale, if you will, the moment the story of a mundane, albeit awful, man takes the life of the woman he claims to love. It's the moment Dr. Oliver Harding allows his paranoia and rage to wash over him, and he shoots Dr. Ruhaba Khan in his office. Just before he does, he tells Ruhaba that she has a "savage degree of selfishness." And it all escalates so quickly from there.

When I sat down with Jha to talk about her book — which I loved, in case that's not obvious — I had to start by asking: Why? Why had she chosen such a brutal, devastating ending?

"That scene was the first scene I wrote in the book," she said. "This was in 2016, in late October, early November, and we know what was going on then. So, that was my mood back then. And I was like, 'I'm going to come back and revisit this. It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to end this way.' And I kept thinking that I would revisit it. And then, when I wrote the first draft ... I went back to that, and I felt like, no, it's fine."

Even if it was a leap, she said it represented a kind of erasure and misogyny that is lurking in our society — and that sometimes explodes when it is allowed to fester.

RELATED: Sonora Jha is a master of paranoia and tension in 'The Laughter'

"I wanted to represent that in this somewhat mild-mannered man on a campus, which is supposed to be a life of letters and the life of the mind," Jha said, referring to the narrator, Oliver. "And in the time that I was writing it, and then in the subsequent years as well, there were so many attacks on women. There were so many assaults on people of color. And we do know that in America, you have men with guns, and always in hindsight, we say, 'Well, we saw the signs, but we didn't think he would go to that extreme.' I wanted to take that and put it in this less likely person. But in hindsight, you see the signs."

Indeed we did. Jha showed the reader all along that Oliver had this in him. Whether he was casually daydreaming about killing a cyclist on page 125 or remorselessly remembering a time when he left his ex-wife "choked for breath" and feeling "violated" on page 119, he left us clues.

And when he not only learns that Ruhaba has no interest in a sexual relationship with him but also that she's been sleeping with a student at the Seattle university they work at, he snaps. He drops his mask of mundanity.

But Rubaba removes her mask, too, Jha pointed out. She acknowledges that she's done something wrong by sleeping with a student, and she fully embodies her imperfection, her own predation. She tells Oliver as much, explaining why they could never be more than friends.

She goes on, now calling Oliver "Dr. Harding" rather than using his first name or his nickname she'd adopted, "Ollie."

"[Ruhaba] drops the filter. She drops the veneer of the collegial assistant professor on her way to tenure. That's the part that she's asked to play," said Jha, herself a professor of journalism at Seattle University. "And that's something I've experienced. And a lot of women faculty of color also experience that. ... [We're told,] 'We love you. We are going to we want to encourage you. We love diversity. We want equity. We are totally behind you. We want to give you all this work to do.' And then, when you are in a position of power, even a tiny bit of power, it's as if these things disappear. And then you're supposed to be grateful for what you got, right? You're supposed to be collegial. You're supposed to know your place."

Ruhaba, in her final moments, looks at the status quo and decided she will not simply be the collegial woman of color who knows her place. And she pays a horrible price for it.

So, does her nephew, Adil.

Adil overheard Oliver bragging to another white professor that he would "be in [Ruhaba's] bed by this weekend," after voting in favor of a new student curriculum, which Ruhaba supported and Oliver and the other professor did not; Oliver only supported it in the hopes of getting sex in return.

Oliver goes on to claim he will sleep with Ruhaba in his office when she comes to him the next day.

That's a boldfaced lie, but Adil doesn't know that as he listens. So, when he follows his aunt to Oliver's office, he intends to save her from her colleague. Of course, he arrives too late.

Adil appears in Oliver's office just after Ruhaba was shot. He finds his beloved aunt on the floor, dead, and suddenly, he is set up. Oliver throws the gun at Adil's feet just in time for an assistant to peak through the door. The assistant sees the gun next to a brown-skinned boy and a white professor with his hands up. The police are called. They find Adil over Ruhaba and Oliver cowering, and they shoot Adil.

"Pause to think about why he was shot by the police," Jha said. "They make their assumptions, and they shoot him, right? And we know that this is what happens with Black and brown bodies in America. ... They see what they want to see. For me, that was a commentary on America as well. The people who have weapons, the good guys with the guns will also not really trust anyone else to be a good guy."

Which is exactly what Oliver wanted the reader to believe. He tries to leave his own clues about Adil's supposed dark side, his alleged desire to hurt people, and pull the reader into his paranoia.

But Adil's own words, in the form of a letter to a girl back home that he entrusts to Oliver, show us how wrong Oliver is.

Finally, crushingly, Adil asks the girl he loves, Camille, to "please believe in the goodness in me."

It's as if Adil is really speaking to the reader here, not Camille. Through Adil, Jha implores the reader to recognize the awful but normalized tendencies of Oliver and to be better than that.

Adil means "the one who is just," Jha writes in "The Laughter." And when I said it seemed to me that that was another sign all along, she said his name wasn't so much about him representing justice but about how Adil was "just a normal young boy, and he just wants to go home to France and ask Camille for a date."

"It's not like he's a really good boy or that he's super innocent or super noble. He is normal," she said. "He's just and fair, yes, but he also just exists. And so I think [it's about] not demanding exceptionalism from a young boy of color."

In the end, we don't really know what happens to Adil to Oliver. All we're left with is the knowledge that a student, a friend of Adil and Ruhaba, has broken into Oliver's home and stolen Adil's letter and the journal Oliver has been writing all of this in, his confession included. As the book ends, the FBI is on their way.

And we can only hope Oliver will get just what he deserves.