Jacob Silverman

The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages

This weekend The National published my review of Sophie Hardach’s first novel. While not a great novel (although it is an enjoyable, sometimes moving read), I did think that Hardach was quite good at exploring some of the less heralded changes wrought by the post-9/11 security state:

In the past decade, we’ve become inured to particular kinds of story that are products of the so-called war on terror: extraordinary renditions, racial profiling at airports, innocent people ending up on watch lists, the transformation of the immigration process to something excruciatingly byzantine. Hardach’s novel should be commended for nodding to but ultimately avoiding some of these stories - not because they’re unimportant but because there are others to tell, ordeals which may be less melodramatic but are all the same representative of the world in which many of us now live.