An Iraqi love feast spiced with despair

Indeed, the sweet humor that "Crescent" delivers so deftly is richly complemented by its exploration of loneliness.

With her characteristic melodrama, the cafe owner says, "The loneliness of the Arab is a terrible thing; it is all-consuming. It is already present like a little shadow under the heart when he lays his head on his mother's lap; it threatens to swallow him whole when he leaves his own country, even though he marries and travels and talks to friends 24 hours a day."

Abu-Jaber whips up a troubling argument about the way American efficiency aggravates that despair.

Sirine's uncle complains that in the US, "people just talk all day long on their phone, their computer, and no one ever lays eyes on each other." A patron in the cafe asks, "Why does no one in America recite poetry? They go to the coffeehouse and they just drink the coffee."

As Sirine gets closer to Han, she comes to realize how starved he is for the sustenance of his homeland. "I miss everything," he tells her in a moment of anguish, "absolutely everything. The fact of exile is bigger than everything else in my life. Leaving my country was like - I don't know - like part of my body was torn away. I have phantom pains from the loss of that part - I'm haunted by myself."

Slowly, she gathers pieces of his tragic history, his escape from Iraq and his family's ghastly fate under Saddam Hussein. Even knowing she can't fill that void, she makes an attempt, grasping after pieces of her father's Iraqi past, investigating Islam, and struggling to immerse herself in the political news she's always ignored.

Han assures her, "You are the place I want to be - you're the opposite of exile," but her uncle warns her that the cure for such loneliness is not so easy. "When we leave our home," he says, "we fall in love with our sadness." Indeed, the demons pulling at Han are stronger than she feared, and the novel begins to veer away from its comic tone toward the horror of Saddam's rule and the ferocity of America's response.

At the same time, Abu-Jaber broadens her exploration of exile to include all the various ways we're bereft of home - by the death of parents, the separation from lovers, the hunger for lost childhood. Gradually, we come to see that every character in this story - Iraqi, American, and Arab-American - is banished by guilt, exiled to sadness by a sentence that can't be lifted by imperial decree or regime change.

Abu-Jaber captures this despair with exquisite care, but her heart belongs to romance, not tragedy. The allusions to "Othello" that waft through the story eventually give way to the uncle's outlandish fairy tale. This is a tough time to consider the artistic and culinary beauty of Iraq, but as one of the cafe patrons says, "Americans need to know about the big, dark, romantic soul of the Arab." Readers stuffed on headlines but still hungering for something relevant will enjoy this rich meal.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. E-mailcharlesr@csmonitor.com.

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