An artist must understand his subject matter.” This seemingly banal demand, from speculatively inclined biochemist J.B.S. Haldane in his 1923 lecture to the Cambridge Heretics, modestly titled “Daedalus of Science and the Future.” After an aside on ferroconcrete architecture, Haldane clarifies: “we must see that possible poets are instructed, as their masters [Milton and Shelley] were, in science and economics.” Haldane, master of the loaded phrase—at the tip of his pen, a recommendation that writers receive education in the sciences does not simply mean that they should take science courses. Brother is not a hallucination; he’s the incarnation of a condition shared by Youssef and his adoptive father. Salim’s disease is never given a name or manifested as a transforming animal companion, but it also causes him to forget the past. Youssef and Salim clash fiercely, but have plenty in common: Intellectuals and storytellers, they share a fierce distaste for American politics. We are told early on that Salim’s proudest legacy may be successfully encouraging his neighbors and friends not to vote. Thus Khalid has charted a novelist’s route out of the central problem of Kant’s critical philosophy, the mind’s irresistible need to question things it can’t possibly know. By accepting, with Gödel, that none of his characters, in the literary logic that constructs them, can be consistent and complete, and that they must oscillate between overlapping, at times conflicting states of singularity and plurality, Khalid has responded to Kant by reversing his central impulse. Where Kant systematically divides conceptual categories in search of precision in thought, Khalid declares the porousness and constant mutability of those divisions, allowing him to write psychological and physical relationships with dynamics little-explored outside the more adventurous segments of contemporary neuroscience and philosophy. Wow is the only word that I can think of to describe this book. It is a novel that transcends genres. I am seriously conflicted about just how many genres I want to add to the list of tags.

I’m taking the unusual-for-me step of abandoning this when I’m already three quarters of the way into it.

Barron, Michael (25 August 2022). "If You Reject Your Identity, You Are Boundless: Zain…". BOMB Magazine. Archived from the original on 21 April 2023 . Retrieved 21 April 2023. Takes the reader from Staten Island to Saudi Arabia on a journey into a unique madness . . . Khalid’s writing is lyrical, with the precise vocabulary of a poetry and a surveyor’s eye for details, yet Brother Alive never gets lost in its erudition—the prose is delightful and clear . . . Ultimately a work of profound sadness as much as political savvy, Brother Alive is a stunning debut.”— Brian Watson, Rain Taxi

Tosiello, Pete (2022-07-12). "A Debut Novel Explores Power in Many Forms, From Capital to Dogma". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-09-25. If we adopt Haldane’s frame of mind, then this is what writers in the 21st Century have to wrestle with, if they are to “understand [their] subject matter.” Immanuel Kant’s philosophy has blown a swath of self-deconstructing rubble into the future of critical philosophy, and science and math after Einstein and Gödel have followed suit.

Praise

We’re in someone’s kitchen; a kid is sitting on the floor. Presumably theirs. Whoever they are, they’re not here. The kid can’t see us, not now; but in the future, he knows we’re here, for he, narrating, has brought us in. (Later, we learn that the kid’s name is Youssef.) We’re in a mosque, in the kitchen. Or near a mosque, at least; and the Imam is there. Night. It feels like night; the words tumble over each other like night. “Time unwinds and winds.” And with Youssef lurks a still-shadowed presence—first a beetle, then a child, but still somehow neither—which Youssef later names “Brother.” Whatever it, or he, is, this Brother is certainly significant: His name is Youssef’s first word, and this, in turn, is the first thing he has chosen to tell us, here, before the first chapter. It is already clear that Brother will be with him for the rest of his life. It also features a certain tolerance for things that Islam does not, in fact, usually approve of...even a range of sexual conduct. Buzz (2022-08-24). "BROTHER ALIVE: family ties, secrets & shapeshifters in Zain Khalid's impressive debut". Buzz Magazine . Retrieved 2023-11-03. Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.

Beguiling . . . A nervy, episodic read . . . Khalid is such a gifted commentator that his methods bear close examination . . . [His] sentences abound with florid, poetic metaphors while maintaining the clipped, declarative tempo of Scripture . . . Brother Alive is Rushdie with none of the ceremony, a searing collage of the profound and the mundane.”— Pete Tosiello, New York Times Book Review

Brother Alive feels like the first work of fiction since the beginning of the pandemic that reflects the mood of the city . . . This book, so focused on the past, sometimes seems to have little optimism for the future. But some of Khalid’s best writing comes when he has Youssef wax eloquent about whatever’s on the horizon. Even though Brother Alive is far from hopeful, wrestling with intellectual and political energies that seem to have no appropriate outlet, Youssef, and his author, maintain a sense of delirious wonder throughout. It’s a very New York quality: Every so often, the cynicism falls away and the sentiment—the affection that keeps us in this worn-out city—shines through.”— Jonah Bromwich, Atlantic

Khalid, though, does not halt his exploration of the pluralizing effects of intimacy at this speculative medical point: Later, Youssef remarks that his brother Iseul’s girlfriend seems to have become somehow plural. As his sibling-disease has somehow pluralized Youssef, so that he shares a mind with Brother, love in whatever form pluralizes its erstwhile singular participants, so that physiological illness may be spread, not simply “from a simple touch,” but by “giving of yourself, being understood.” And Khalid goes still further: The air near a cold character is “ten degrees colder than the surrounding air.” A man with a dark past seems to darken the sun when present. When a character with a shadowed past walks into a room, it seems that all history’s mysteries swirl in the gases around him.But there is something rotten under the surface and has been ever since the boys were born, even before, this plan. At least one of the three boys along with the Iman has a disease. It is at this point that the novel shows its genre-bridging features. I would suggest that it qualifies as science fiction, although the book is not labeled as science fiction.