By Ariel N. Banayan
Compared to other immigrant communities, Persians in Los Angeles are an anomaly landlocked between the Pacific Ocean and the continual throes to accrue capital. Yes, as immigrants, there’s the usual attempt to balance newfound “American” values alongside the old country traditions. We all know the types of stories that follow immigrants in this country: the aromatic box of ethnic food that baffles thinner nostrils, the mispronunciation of words in front of the class, and so on. Meanwhile, Porochista Khakpour‘s novel, Tehrangeles, offers a unique dilemma regarding the experience of representing Persians in diaspora on the page. How can one authentically depict a community that exists beyond the believability of satire itself? What happens when reality eclipses the ridiculous and outlandish dimensions of satire? While the novel doesn’t offer a solution exactly, it does reveal how much of the immigrant narrative is altered by the presence of wealth and the attempt to satirize it.
Tehrangeles follows a wealthy Persian family in West LA prepping for the potential filming of a reality show about their lives. The Milanis are an amalgam of the Shahs of Sunset and Keeping Up With The Kardashians, with the hopes of presenting a similar ludicrous image of wealth and emotion on the screen. Instead of embodying the traditional immigrant formula where immigrant + hard work + luck = riches & success, the Milanis are all already wealthy, and they don’t hesitate to show it. Their home is illustrious, and their pet cat is precious as a diamond. However, even when we are told the brief origin of the Milani’s wealth, readers witness them shuffle between the absurdity of having too much money to function normally at all and living as diasporic Persians in Los Angeles.
The father, Al Milani, touts the usual immigrant American experience of amassing wealth. Hungry for an opportunity at whatever American success he can find, Al eventually strikes it rich after combining his love for Persian meatballs with leftover ingredients from a pizza shop to build an empire on microwaveable balls of dough with pizza filling (this isn’t meant to be satire, exactly). Al embodies that traditional formula I mentioned earlier. His hard work and belief in the ability for America to sell propel him into the luxury Los Angeles touts as its main appeal—comfort.
Al marries Homa, another Persian immigrant desperately trying to erase her Persian accent. Unlike Al, Homa is presented as the Iranian who tires of being treated as an outsider in the city. She wants nothing more but to assimilate into an unrealistic idea of Los Angeles as paradise, all while Al continues to maintain his roles as a husband, father, immigrant in America who struck his metaphoric oil. While Al and Homa explore their immigrant identity in different ways, they both hold the same belief about their new home. California becomes that glorified form of certain American values that allowed them to succeed and rise to wealth, a place where the mythic legacy of Manifest Destiny has been accomplished, sea from shining sea, until the sun shines brighter than the harmonies in a Beach Boys song. Of course, these values are all idealizations, routinely satirized to the point of becoming tropes to be viewed on reality television.
As readers of a novel, we aren’t given that highly glamorized, self-aware moving image of that “Milani product,” since the novel itself stops us from seeing most of its ludicrousness as something ridiculous. The Milani family members, especially the daughters (with the exception of Roxanna) all take part in daily lives that are predictable and typical of the Persian community of Los Angeles.
One thinks of a Mel Brooks film as the ideal satire, where a genre is mocked and exaggerated in the specific medium of film. The audience watching Blazing Saddles can easily recognize the tension underlying the exaggerated play of its racial comedy (even when its sense of humor feels outdated by today’s moral/comedic standards). However, Tehrangeles is a novel that eludes the same bend on expectations. It creates a blurred middle ground, a less than distinct border drawn out on a map of identity. Only one character feels like a true satirical entity: Roxanna, the third oldest Milani daughter. Roxanna is obsessed with the subjectivity of reality, and is the main driving force behind the novel’s “hijinks.” She idolizes reality TV and openly embraces the reality television show being made about them. Frustrated by her own life and situation, she attempts to change her birthday to reorient her Zodiac sign, and even willingly admits to sending nudes without batting an eye. Roxanna is the largest signifier to the novel’s satirical status since her rabid ethos surrounding pop culture and reality television has yet to be realized as an actual trope or person. These are all quixotic and delusional ways to override the way reality works by willpower alone. Roxanna’s own self interest makes sense to herself, yet comes off as ridiculous for the reader.
The other Milani siblings carry the authenticity of child-of-immigrant struggle and the ridiculousness of wealth, but to a lesser satirical extent than Roxanna. The eldest, Violet, serendipitously becomes a model after being discovered while shopping at a mall. As she meets with photographers and gains acclaim for centering herself in the middle of a camera’s gaze, she soon participates in a photoshoot turned awry. A photographer asks to wear a chador (a version of a headscarf) and a bikini at the same time. Is this disrespectful? Yes, obviously. But is this a shocking dimension to American modeling? No, it feels like a less tame SNL sketch modeled after a viral BuzzFeed headline, complete with television execs nearby with their fingers on the censor button.
The second eldest sister in the lineup, Mina, adores the thrashing tide of social media’s mayhem and fanaticism. Mina has absolutely no interest in being “known” as a star unlike her other sisters (a seemingly rare personality in West Los Angeles, for sure). Mina becomes the sole Milani sister searching for a comfortable space surrounding her queerness, which of course makes her find true comfort on the internet. She loves pop culture, K-pop in particular, and openly embraces the anonymous bitter ethos of Twitter users that cannot exist outside of Twitter itself. Here we have another character blessed with a drop of ridiculousness, but who could nonetheless still be found scrolling on TikTok at an overpriced coffee shop. The youngest Milani, Haylee, is shown as the next rising star after Roxanna. Haylee can cry on command, touts herself as the only natural blonde in the family, and complains that she’s too popular as a middle schooler. All ripe ingredients to create another Kardashian.
Again, between the three sisters (excluding Roxanna), we can once again see where the satire itself seems to dissolve. Even when Mina, Haylee, and Violet offer different interpretations of the LA Persian identity, the three sisters do not stray too far from the actual weirdness of the real models, predestined Kardashians, and Twitter users who never post a profile picture of themselves. They aren’t exaggerated depictions that warrant true satire yet, nor are they poor reflections of certain LA Persians. They simply exist and worry and try to gain some stability from the events around them.
We as readers are given more insight into their lives than the camera and reality TV editors and FCC would ever allow, showcasing more of the blur between satirical and realistic. Even as a war with Iran looms overhead until it dissipates—we see the Milanis’ reactions, and they are somewhat ridiculous. They worry over their image, their social life, and the show. A mysterious virus named COVID-10 threatens closures and a rupture to their routines and the potential for more wealth and fame—and we hear similar thoughts concerning their own selves above others.
The stress of throwing a party during pandemic closures is particularly written to ruffle some ethical feathers, all without really challenging the reasons or notions behind throwing a party at definitely the wrong time. Again, I’m not arguing about the ethics of representing the COVID party in a novel. Khakpour and the readers (hopefully) understand its moral staging. Celebrity doppelgangers show up and confuse the Milanis. Mina herself gets to indulge her crush with another cute girl at the party. Al even takes acid, which makes him hallucinate about Iran in Persian. However, I was still left in a state of hunger for a stronger push for the ridiculousness of satire here. While these moments themselves are outlandish, they aren’t out of the ordinary from the rich Persian experience, or the typical Hollywood house party. One can imagine Eve Babitz at the Milani residence, dancing with the sweaty crowd and breathing in the potentially COVID filled air. Didion would stand in the corner, swathed in several face masks to observe, noticing the ice melt in her glass of water. As a reader and a Persian in Los Angeles, I craved to experience their anguish and allegedly understand their perspective through the words and narration on the page (without needing to rely on my own experiences), all while trying to suss out a deeper moral impetus motivating most satire beyond simple laughs and a shake of the head in disagreement.
Beyond its dilemma of satirizing people who embody a place beyond satire itself, Khakpour does offer a sense of humanity as a redeeming factor for most characters. While they aren’t the most humble people, Khakpour still presents a strong logic behind why the Milani family acts in a certain way. Beneath the attempt to maintain cultural relevance, there’s a fear and anxiety (inherited from Al and Homa) that all the stress of being an immigrant in a city like Los Angeles wasn’t worth it. If there wasn’t the mansion, the party, the allure of the reality television show drawing in an audience to critique and follow each Milani, then why did they come to America? Why does anyone come to this country, really?
Ariel N. Banayan is a Persian Jewish writer born and raised in Los Angeles, for better or worse. He has published poems in Guesthouse Lit, The Crab Creek Review, and other places.