The Promised Land

At first blush, Porochista Khakpour’s satirical, polyphonic, campy, and absorbing third novel, Tehrangeles, seems a departure from her earlier work. She’s described it as an Iranian American Little Women, although in this book, both economic status and the fates of certain characters are reversed. Here, Khakpour tells the story of a wealthy Iranian American family with four Gen Z daughters—Violet, Roxanna, Mina, and Haylee—who are set to star in a reality show when the COVID-19 pandemic hits.

Khakpour’s earlier novels were Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion. In Tehrangeles, her maximalist style is further amplified. While grounded in naturalistic contemporary detail, the novel playfully contests American realism, integrating mini-essays, including a few pages in Persian about missing nature and Iran; the saga of a cat in love; and one section written in a Ulysses-inspired Valley girl stream of consciousness.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How do you see Tehrangeles fitting in with the rest of your work?
The book started as a joke. There were editors pitching what my second novel should be—people were so against The Last Illusion. Tehrangeles ended up being a satire that, hopefully, has some heart, but it initially started as a satire written out of spite. I was like, OK, this is what you guys want. Here’s what that’ll be like, what it might be like. Then, over time, I got interested in it more and more. There was a long period when I didn’t know how to write it because I didn’t understand the voice. It took the advent of TikTok, and then the pandemic, for it to come together.

What helped me a lot was reading Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians and feeling like, Oh my god, this is a Tolstoy of our time. Yeah, it’s commercial. Yeah, it’s got this mass appeal, but it’s undeniably brilliant. There is a way to tell the story of these kinds of rich, superficial, and sort of toxic people, yet still make it good.

There are moments when you break the realism—as with the pet psychic.
I always need a bit of fabulism in my work to make it feel like me. I only have one character I allied with—Mina. All these other characters don’t care about saying horrible things, getting canceled. There were no limits to where I could take it: I could have a super-spreader party, which in reality is my worst nightmare, or get deep into the mind of a teenager who’s becoming MAGA. It let me unravel; that’s where the pet psychic comes in. The stakes were all over the place. The challenge was how to bring it home.

Your background is different from that of your characters. Did you do research for this book?
I was a shopgirl on Rodeo Drive. I was very low on the food chain and extremely disrespected. For characters like this, shopgirl is bad enough, but an Iranian shopgirl is going to seem like a real failure: Why would that be your life? I failed out of this world, almost immediately, just based on where we lived in Los Angeles, which was the other part of town. But we’d come to Beverly Hills to eat Persian food, to go to Persian grocery stores, all these things that catered to rich Iranians who wanted to bring a slice of Iran with them.

In terms of specifics, every time I’d go back to L.A., I would spend time in this area, just to observe. I grew up around malls, but the Eastside malls in Los Angeles are different from these Westside malls. I started going to the ones these kids frequent, like the Beverly Center.

A lot of the research was on TikTok. I was on TikTok very early on, but I didn’t have a public account until recently. I didn’t post as myself. I didn’t post at all. I just lurked.… There’s this Iranian influencer I’m kind of obsessed with called Tara Yummy. She’s so of the world of these girls, a little cooler, but still. That became a great window for me because I was dealing with the transition from being semi-bedridden and still chronically ill.

Typically, you don’t write from the point of view of women.
When my publisher started categorizing this as women’s fiction, I had a real crisis. What’s women’s fiction? I hate that label. But seeing Crazy Rich Asians called that, I was like, OK, fine. The thing that made this unique for me was the age difference. Because it was written with such distance—yes, all women, but very young women—there was enough of a gap that it became as interesting to me.

I like projects that require invention and experimentation and things outside my everyday reality. I like the challenge of fiction. The pandemic solidified for me that this is a Gen Z book. That allowed me to write about people who are different, which was like writing about middle-age or quarter-life-crises men, as I have before.

While you do write about Iran, you tend more to address the Iranians living in the United States; your work is very rooted in the America of now.
My timeline of life coincides almost exactly with the Iranian Revolution. I was born in 1978, and the revolution was in 1979. Most of my life was spent in the U.S., and now exactly half has been as an American citizen. I think that the most honest thing to do is really to write about this world. It’s always difficult with Iran, especially in regard to the U.S. There’s an ongoing drama always there with these two countries, and the two cultures are forever intertwined.•