Mindful of an audience not steeped in Persian history, Sofer goes out of her way to provide historical orientation — sometimes deftly, in old news clippings, and sometimes more heavily, in expository dialogue. “He got his start in the Constitutional Revolution in 1906,” Hamid’s father tells the narrator in a childhood scene, referring to the exiled prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. “As prime minister he introduced social security and land reforms, and his downfall, as everyone knows, was his nationalization of the oil industry, which until then had been controlled by the British.” While helpful for an uninformed reader, it’s perhaps a bit much for a chat with a child on the way home from the dentist.

Similarly, the Persian phrases, usually idiomatic ones, that pepper the dialogue are translated for the reader throughout the book — often, puzzlingly, by the person who just spoke them. Sofer manages this naturally at times (“You’re back to your khorous jangi ways. My son, the fighting cock”), and a bit more nonsensically at others (“Shab-bekheyr — have a good night”).

All of this raises the question not of whom the book is for but to whom it’s being narrated. To whom is Hamid Mozaffarian telling this story? To whom is he, in theory, explaining himself? The self-examination he puts himself through in New York and then back in Tehran would suggest that the voice is an inward one, directed at the self. Or perhaps the audience he holds in his head is his family, his deceased father, whose legacy Hamid, in his role as destroyer, both reveres and obliterates. Yet the book’s exposition is angled toward an outsider’s gaze — and there’s real discord between the narrative’s commitment to interiority and the sacrifices it makes in explaining itself. This is the perennial struggle faced by any writer whose imagined narrative audience and likely actual audience don’t fully align, but there are solutions more elegant than these.

The arc of Hamid’s life is finely wrought, a master class in the layering of time and contradiction that gives us a deeply imagined, and deeply human, soul — an enviable skill always, but essential for attaching us to a character who, despite his attempts at self-betterment, is essentially unforgivable. But “forgiveness isn’t the point,” says Hamid’s daughter, Golnaz, who is struggling to come to terms with him. “The best I can do is try to understand.”

I won’t be alone in finding the dichotomy personal. My own father, after Hungary’s failed 1956 student revolt, arrived in the United States as a refugee. In the same week that I read about Hamid’s journey home with his father’s ashes, I was coming to accept that, quarantined in Chicago amid a pandemic, I would not make it back this spring for the interment of my father’s ashes in Budapest, where he’d repatriated at the age of 80. Like so many children whose parents were formed by histories wildly different from our own — and like both Golnaz and Hamid — I’ve sometimes found both forgiveness and understanding elusive.

While Sofer is part of a notable generation of Iranian-American writers who write, in part, about divided families, divided worlds and divided selves, she is also, more broadly, part of an enduring American tradition: the writer who lives, creatively, both here and in the imaginative territory of another time and place, a point of familial or personal origin that looms large. The beating heart of American literature has always been the contributions of those looking both forward and back, both at America and at the world. Members not of skipped generations, necessarily, but of Janus-headed ones, writing toward something more difficult than forgiveness.