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

This is KUOW's book club, and we just read the first half of 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.

I

first met Jha at the KUOW Book Club's first live event with Kristen Millares Young in July. I already knew I wanted to include her novel, "The Laughter," in the club's reading, but I hadn't decided when we would get to it. Jha helpfully suggested we read it in November, as much of the book takes place that same month. Perfect, right?

Readers, I couldn't have known just how perfect that suggestion was. I'm not even sure Jha could've known how perfect it would end up being for the time.

"The Laughter" doesn't just take place during some nebulous November; it is set just before and during November 2016. The characters are watching "Candidate Trump" and his campaign take shape. At this point, nine chapters in, they don't know he will become President Trump. But this backdrop provides an extra layer of tension as our frankly abhorrent narrator, English professor Oliver Harding, reveals his twisted tale.

RELATED: KUOW Book Club's November read: Sonora Jha's subversive novel 'The Laughter'

He becomes obsessed with a colleague, Ruhaba Khan, a Pakistani Muslim law professor. Oliver sees her as "exotic," to put it mildly, and he sets out to romance her. At least, that's how he characterizes his efforts. One (me) might consider his constant imagining her naked and his efforts to get her alone to be more creepy than romantic.

Then, Ruhaba's nephew Adil comes from France to live with her. He's sent away after getting involved with what we've been led to believe was a potentially dangerous group of young Muslims. And that makes him a perfect target for Oliver's rising paranoia.

To be clear up front: I have no desire to start a debate about President-elect Donald Trump here. But there are political themes Jha explores in "The Laughter" that I won't shy away from either. From my perspective as a reader, Oliver Harding is a misogynist, a racist — more specifically an Islamophobe — a liar, and a connard. Pardon my French.

RELATED: Subscribe to the KUOW Book Club newsletter here

And the thing about him that really bothers me is that he's terribly unoriginal, as he is here, lamenting the changing of the times:

Speaking of "desperate seekers," Oliver seems to busy himself more with chasing Ruhaba than anything else — except maybe trying to catch her nephew in the middle of some imagined nefarious act.

Remember, Adil got involved with other young Muslims in Toulouse after his mother was humiliated by French police. He and his comrades were angry about their mothers, sisters, and other women in their lives being targeted. When the other boys decided to take some unspecified action, Adil left the group, writing to say, "he didn't feel he fit in with direct action." The email was intercepted by the French authorities, arrests were made, and Adil was sent away.

Oliver learns all of this through the course of an FBI inquiry, his serendipitous involvement in which seems to make Oliver think he has the right to stick his nose where it doesn't belong.

But it also serves to heighten this tension Jha creates around Oliver. Consider this passage:

How presumptuous.

B

ut this is where Jha's writing shines brightest, in her ability to cast false shadows. She builds this tension and draws the reader into Oliver's paranoia so thoroughly that we feel his fear, his panic. For example, the fog and ghostly figures gathered around Adil as he plays a flute at the park transform a perfectly normal scene into something straight out of a horror story, complete with monsters of one kind or another. I knew Adil wasn't up to anything at that moment — he's walking Oliver's dog for goodness sake — yet I found my jaw clenched in anticipation of something heinous. Jha put me in the uncomfortable but compelling position of seeing things through the eyes of a character I abhor.

As much as I dislike Oliver, I have to stick with him like every other reader. He's our ambling storyteller, slowing revealing a series of events that will (spoiler alert!) lead to Adil being shot and "closer to life than to death" in the hospital.

The Oliver telling us this story knows that. We readers don't know yet what happened exactly. But somehow I know, with all my heart, that the old connard brought this on Adil and Ruhaba's house.