Diana Abu-Jaber Wed., July 11 at Powell's Books

[July 11th, 2007]

Diana Abu-Jaber can't stay in one spot—in a geographic or literary sense. Currently, the fortysomething Portland State University English professor spends each fall in the Rose City, winters 3,000 miles away in Miami and devotes other months to signing books throughout the country. Her writings are similarly peripatetic: Abu-Jaber first gained fans for her lushly written tales of Arab-American life, only to morph into a gastro-memoirist in 2005's charming, recipe-filled The Language of Baklava. Her fourth book, Origin (Norton, 384 pages, $24.95), finds the author taking her biggest leap into new territory, landing firmly in the thriller genre—with a lyrical literary twist.

It actually works: Protagonist Lena Dawson is a brilliant fingerprint analyst who believes she was raised by apes and finds more solace in loaves of freshly baked bread than human contact. When a nasty spate of suspect crib death starts claiming New York state's youngest citizens, it's up to Lena to solve the case—and face some unsettling questions about her own origins. Although the book's last few chapters rush to create a Sue Grafton-worthy finish, Abu-Jaber's sinuous descriptions and oddball characters make the off-kilter tale sing. WW caught her via phone in Miami to talk thrillers, orphans and how Portland's rainy months make for kinky writers. .

WW: Why can't you stick to one genre?
Diana Abu-Jaber: I get bored easily. I believe I have inherited genetic nomadism. My father's father was a real, true Bedouin who moved around on a caravan.... I have this horror of telling the same story over and over again. One of the reasons I tried writing this genre [was because I] moved to Florida. It's such a thriller place. Bookstores...are filled with mystery and crime books. This place is it for that kind of writing. And those are the [kind of] writers that you meet here...and they seemed like they were having so much fun.

What new muscles did you have to flex to write Origin?
I woke up one morning with [Lena's] voice in my head. I knew this person. But I knew nothing about fingerprinting. I amassed a small library on forensics. I bought a fingerprinting kit. I fingerprinted my friends.... I had to learn to write a plot. Literary writers, we know about character and we hope plot emerges from character. With genre writing I had to focus on a strong, linear, suspenseful plot—embedding clues, tension. And it all had to add up in the end. That was all brand new to me.

Why the adoption theme? Are you adopted?
No. [But] my father is a Jordanian immigrant, and he told me and my sisters that we were Arab. But we were growing up [and were born in] the U.S. And I didn't look Middle Eastern. That was so disorienting to me, that dislocation of identity. I took that idea of having to re-create oneself and tried to think of another way of exploring it. As I was researching, I found more and more folds in the topics [of adoption and SIDS]. And I've been having people tell me that they are craving reading about that experience and they want more books about it. I may return to that subject area in subsequent Lena books. I hadn't planned to, but I've discovered with mystery books [that] people expect a series.

What's with the apes?
[She laughs] The reviewer for Entertainment Weekly was very upset with the whole monkey thing. She wouldn't go with it. My mom got so upset by that. She wrote to Entertainment Weekly to say [the writer] didn't understand my work.

Your previous books focus on an Arab-American experience. Why jettison that?
I'm not leaving behind those themes but I'm enlarging the conversation. It started to feel like I was getting into a bit of typecasting... with the "Arab-American/food" thing. I guess it's part of the [booksellers'] marketing strategy. All I heard when Arabian Jazz came out was "Diana is the Arab Amy Tan."

Let's go back to the whole "Miami made me write a crime novel" thing...
I have this whole theory that different cities have different identities based on their climate. It's in the shape of the land, in the sky, it's in the weather...it affects everyone who lives there. [Portland is] a city of the mind because you have to go inside. It's always raining so it's conducive to being in bookstores and galleries. Miami, it's beautiful and sunny so it's of the body. It's conducive to lying on the beach.

So what links Portland writers? What's in our water?
There's definitely a kind of kinky, off-centeredness about the Portland identity. Think about writers like Chuck Palahniuk or Katherine Dunn. Even Ursula Le Guin. It's not straight-down-the-middle American realism. It's kind of a tweaked way of looking at things...OK, I haven't worked this theory out yet. But it's ever-so-slightly cockeyed.

And you?
Oh yeah, I am way cockeyed, too.