The Crumbling of a Porous Life: A Conversation With Naeem Murr

 Naeem Murr’s latest novel, Every Exit Brings You Home, intimately questions what it means to have a home, family, faith, and whether anyone in this modern era can truly be “innocent.” The novel tells the story of Jamal Shaban (“Jack” to his American friends): a Palestinian immigrant working as a flight attendant based in Chicago, IL circa 2007 with his devoutly Muslim wife, Dimra. As Jack struggles with the ghosts of his past life in Gaza and tries to save his crumbling condo building in Chicago, he learns that as much as he might try, he can’t hide from himself.

Jack has a strained relationship with the six other owners in his condo building. As the president of the condo board, he’s taken on the responsibility of plugging the holes of the sinking ship of a building—built hastily and cheaply by a now defunct developer. Fielding texts and calls at all hours of the day and night, any semblance of peace for Jack is upended when Marcia—an angry, scared, and aggressive single mother—moves into the building. As the situation at his home in Chicago crumbles, so does his other home in Gaza as Palestine enters into another brutal conflict with Israel after the election of Hamas. All of Jamal’s attempts to escape—through adultery, work, and an alter ego—ultimately can’t protect him from the hard truths he has to face about his past, present, and future. To save himself, he has to find himself before it is too late.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Murr on the phone about the power struggles between the members of the condo, character development, and the complicated nature of chasing the “American dream.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Rumpus: A central focus of Every Exit Brings You Home are the relationships between Jack and the six other owners of the condo they share. As their home is threatened by shoddy craftsmanship and a new tenant, Marcia, they start to wield whatever power they have against Jack, the condo board president. How did these power struggles develop as you wrote the novel?

Naeem Murr: I don’t think I really thought about that. I mean, Jack is a sort of mediator. He often feels disempowered. He is not really connected to the world. He wants desperately to move forward and can’t find a way forward. There’s a lot of disempowerment that leads people to then want to empower themselves over their environment, especially when that environment becomes very precarious. Dimra, Jack’s wife, is somebody who’s completely disempowered in a certain way. She’s someone who has never quite assimilated into this world, even into this place. When their home is described, it’s described as having these standard Muslim pictures on the wall, [a framed poster of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock]. 

It’s not really a home and she spends her life completely wired into the conflict of her past in a house that isn’t really a home and never quite assimilates. In a way, both she and Jack—who becomes a flight attendant—are sort of not there and yet have to deal with the issues with their neighbor, May: she’s someone who’s been entirely, completely disempowered in her life and then attempts again to sort of empower herself. She’s this woman who is an enormous presence in Jack’s life. They have to spend their life literally treading incredibly carefully around her. And then you have Marcia, who again is this incredibly disempowered person for whom anger becomes her central energy, the way in which she can empower herself over the world, even though it’s fragile. And it does not help her to do that, it really isn’t an energy that is a good energy for her. But again, you have these victims who try to find ways to empower themselves. We have that disempowerment everywhere: we have Lulu, his neighbor, who is powerless in the face of her girlfriend, Valeria. That is an incredibly unbalanced relationship. Because of that, it’s a disastrous relationship when one side has all the power. So every relationship in one way or another, reflects that reaction to powerlessness.

Rumpus: Early on, we get clear first impressions of each character and how they deal with feeling powerless, like May constantly texting Jack to make him fix her problems or threatening fines. As the story goes on, though, those initial impressions are challenged in really interesting ways. I’m curious about your process for creating such complex characters?

Murr: I think with most literary books, character is absolutely central. I had been working on another novel about my Palestinian family for years—actually for over a decade. And suddenly I got this idea after seeing a couple outside my own condo building, sitting in an old Chevy Impala attached to a U-Haul trailer—I thought it was a short story and it just came to life. And it was as if suddenly all of the things I’ve been thinking about, pondering over, found its form. Suddenly I found Jack facing me across the page and it wasn’t really a process of creation so much as a collaboration.

When I started, I had no idea about Jack’s past. I didn’t think he was married: my first impression was that he was going to be a single guy living in this building and then this woman was going to move in, but very quickly it was apparent that he was married. Some of it is more conscious, but a lot of it is that character. For a character to really come to life on the page they have to retain a kind of mystery for you as a writer. Of course, there are some characters who are much more flat, who are comic, or just minor characters. But for the characters who are significant, they have to be real. They have to be facing you across the page. And then you sort of collaborate with them. With May again, as she was emerging as a sort of antagonist character, it never occurred to me that she would have a child, but then Dan sort of came along. It seems inevitable in terms of her defensiveness, her vulnerability—she needed this other dimension as well. And the child was that other dimension but also fitted with a theme that is in the book, which is about lost sons. There are a lot of lost sons in the book. In any real conflict there are a lot of young men who get killed or lost. We have Nafiz and we have Jamal and we have Kyle, and Dan is still alive, but kind of lost to addiction. If the book has had enough time to gestate and find its form, the characters take on a kind of archetypal quality and they take on the themes I’ve been thinking about for years and years.

The characters themselves become fully integrated beings and it is hard conscious work. It’s like chipping marble more than something literally coming to life and coming to birth. I think there are different kinds of writers. When you think about someone like Flaubert, he doesn’t really like people very much. And so his characters—when you read Madame Bovary or something—they feel slightly more constructed and he has a much more critical and distant eye upon them. I mean, I’m not saying he’s not a great writer—he is a great writer. But there is something in him—Ellen Gilchrist is another person—where what they’re really looking at is human limitation, that a person is created in some sense out of their limitations. For me, I’ve just never felt that way. I’ve always felt life is tragic and I’ve always felt enormous sympathy for just how difficult life is. We are born with all kinds of potentialities and then life happens and even our capacities to imagine and to empathize can be crushed out of us. Imagination is this incredibly volatile capacity and you can lose it in some ways. When people are damaged or victimized—such as May—they lose the capacity to imagine; they lose the capacity to empathize because fear is right at their heart. And that’s the other element that is at the heart of these characters. It’s at the heart of Jack. The central energy at the heart of Dimra is shame; at the heart of May, the central energy is fear. It’s just being afraid, which I think is true of Marcia also.

Rumpus: Your sympathy is apparent and you really show the reader the humanity in each person. One way you do that is through very specific observations about them and about their homes, in particular. Do you feel like you’re especially observant or do you start noticing the world through their eyes and pick up those details to give color to each character?

Murr: For me, writing is about delegating. The first thing that you do, you delegate to language; you delegate to structure. In other words, they’re the things that really help you tell the story rather than you trying to do everything yourself. And I think one of the most important things to delegate to is setting. The setting can just do so much, can contain so much meaning, so much of the characterization of a person, and can generate a kind of language about them or create both a sense of who they are, but also these somewhat contradictory aspects. May’s place is actually incredibly beautiful and sort of fecund and full of plants. But of course there’s the television with disaster—always disaster—or bad daytime television that is her equivalent to a gas fire that’s always on. It’s this background: the world and the horrors of the world sort of seep into her life—a little bit like Dimra in that way and for so much of us.

I lived in a huge block of flats when I was a little kid in London and it was a very porous place. And this is the thing about the novel: the novel is full of porousness. We move back and forth in time. When Jack remembers Gaza, he will also remember the incredible porousness of that place—that you could hear everybody’s lives. It’s like you’re a nexus at the center of human suffering. Everybody is completely connected as they are completely separated. How disconnected we are and how connected we are at the same time that you can hear someone sobbing. You can hear people making love. You can hear anger, but you’re also in this separated space.

When I was a kid, my mother used to open the door and say, “Go. Don’t come back until it is dark.” And we would be in and out of each other’s houses. We would witness very adult situations—arguments and all kinds of things. I remember that porousness. But I also remember—particularly when you’re a child—how strange another person’s home felt. You know everything about them: the smells, the things somebody chose to put on the wall, or if they had nothing on the wall, just all of those elements. I remember them so vividly. And so when I thought about people in their lives, they’re always connected to a place, a smell, a particular configuration. At one point Jack says all of these apartments are exactly the same. They all have the same configuration except for the basement, but then everyone’s condo is a completely different space. They’ve only been there over just about a year and every one of them is a completely different world, generated from a completely different character.

Rumpus: This porousness does create a simmering tension all throughout. Especially when Jack is a boy, living in Gaza, and trying to hide his true self. This creates a loneliness in him that he brings to America. Do you think that loneliness is a natural part of the emigration process? How has that played into your own story that maybe came out onto the page?

Murr: There are so many ways in which Jack is lost. All of us are in some ways sort of immigrants from our childhood, right? That’s the time of this incredible vividness before language kind of starts, before identity really takes hold, before language really starts to configure, and our culture starts to configure the world around us. And Jack himself—right from the start—his mother’s an Egyptian aristocrat. His father is always in jail. So in terms of his own masking and identity, there’s a conflict. But also, he lives in this sort of bell jar life with his mother so it’s as if he’s an immigrant to Gaza. His mother loves Western literature. He speaks with BBC English, Parisian French, what they would call “film star Egyptian Arabic.” Then he has to code switch when he goes out onto the streets. He says at one point that he would be so lost in War and Peace that he’d open up the door expecting the wide boulevards of St. Petersburg, not the narrow streets of Beach Camp in Gaza. So he’s always displaced. He has the taboo relationship with Salim. Everything is a kind of wrongness and everything doesn’t fit except for his singular relationships that he has with people. That’s it. That’s his world: his intense relationship with his mother, his relationship with his cousin. Those moments are moments of intense intimacy and connectedness, but within the context of absolute estrangement.

For me, that nuclear moment of intimate estrangement or intimacy under the pressure of enormous estrangement is powerful. It’s a sort of singularity at the heart of fiction, the struggle between connection and disconnection. All of that is carried into his life and he’s somebody you can’t cohere as a person, really. He can’t move forward. One of the ways I think about him is that he has a past that’s too full of love to completely cauterise and too full of pain to fully assimilate. So he’s trapped between those things and so he compartmentalizes his life. He becomes a flight attendant and there, he is a completely different person. The people he works with don’t even know he’s married. He’s “Jack.” He speaks with a Midwestern accent. At home, his wife really knows nothing about his life away. So he is just this person who’s struggling, which is incredibly lonely in and of itself.

I think fiction is about two things: It’s about intimacy and it’s about truth. They’re the two things that it is about. If the truth is compromised in some ways, then you cannot connect to another person. Connecting to another person is about being able to speak the truth. And of course human beings are useless at being able to say the thing that is true mostly because they lie to themselves as much as they lie to other people. So part of the loneliness is that he’s compartmentalized. He has these really intimate relationships with people, but they are also incredibly estranged because everything is a lie in his life.

Myself as a child in London—I would say I felt very alienated. My mother was Irish. My father died when I was very young. My mother had a sort of Angela’s Ashes kind of childhood in Ireland, but she told us nothing about that. She gave us this sort of upper middle class English accent. We lived in a very working class area of London at that time, which was so completely disjunctive. I didn’t feel Palestinian or Lebanese. I didn’t feel especially English, really. I felt very alienated from England and I didn’t feel Irish. I kind of had a sense that my mother was Irish because she would sometimes slip into her brogue with neighbors of ours, which I remember was [an] odd experience. And there were some Gaelic phrases that she would sometimes use. In the book, definitely a lot of that is coming through, in the way that childhood is like our mythos. Our gods and monsters are formed there. For all my books, there are often mothers who have these secrets they don’t tell, which is true of Jack’s mother. Fathers are either ghosts or they’re monsters, one or the other. And Jack’s father is essentially both of those things: he’s a ghost and a sort of monster. somebody you have to feel for as well as his very tragic life.

This is all stuff that I didn’t think about when writing. They are the energies that lie underneath a work because it has to be connected intimately to your life in order for it to have emotional traction and feel urgent to you in some way.

Rumpus: Everyone in the novel is trying to hold on to the “American dream” in some way—even the Americans themselves. Each character—especially Jack—has a very complicated relationship with America.

Murr: In the book, Jack says that America is sort of the great Satan when you’re living in Palestine, but at the same time that’s where everyone wanted to go. It was the source of the television that people watch. It’s a place of wealth and all kinds of opportunity, the kind of opportunities that someone in Gaza could not possibly even dream of. Here we are now, in 2026, with what’s going on now, the undermining of the very soul and spirit of a country that is about transformation. It’s about the possibility that you can transform, that you can become something else. That you can move out of stasis, the place where you cannot transform, you cannot do anything. And so here Jack is with this opportunity, in this place. At the same time, suddenly everything is collapsing and the whole dream is starting to fall apart. And again, it’s all about this porousness, how you have Palestinians who have lost their homes, and in America during the financial crisis I think about 2 million people lost their homes in Chicago. I was here during that time and saw so many people at the lower end of the economic scale, people of color who lost their homes.

All the way through the novel is this idea of trying to shed your skin or trying to shed who you once were and become something new and renewed. It’s sort of an essential part of the “American dream.” When you think of Dimra’s family, when they came to the camps, they changed their names because originally in the town—which she was named after—they were the lowest of the low. They were people who’d come from Ottoman deserters during the war or Egyptian migrant laborers, and there was this stratified world, even in the Palestinian villages. And so they remade themselves as refugees. They changed their status by changing their names. Even within the context of the Nakba—[the mass displacement of Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948]—and losing your home, there is this desire for a kind of shift or transformation of status.

One of the central issues in the book is, “How do you move forward given having a traumatic past?” It’s also true of every one of us, and it doesn’t matter if we have a traumatic past or not. Everything that we encounter is categorized and understood by what we have lived through already. We have to thread our way into our future through our past. And of course it can make it far more difficult if your past is traumatic and complicated.