on black and white

Exclusive: Amran Gowani, debut author of LEVERAGE

Seeing the writing on the wall is not necessarily easy. The words may spill off, ink dripping in lagging morsels, physically morphing into new meanings. The walls themselves might vanish — torn down, vandalized, or plastered over with fresher declarations.

Amran Gowani, author of Atria Books’ upcoming Leverage, thinks it shouldn’t be difficult. Regardless of who put them there, the words are on the wall for a reason – as the saying implies, they are easily distinguishable. The impact is immediate, a gut punch. The ache that follows belongs entirely to you.

Great art, he says, will give you both.

In Leverage, Gowani’s debut novel, we meet Al – a hedge fund insider navigating the claustrophobic, Illuminati-style cliques that form in trading firms. It’s a world few of us inhabit, making it hard to find that ache, that sympathy for him or any of the supporting characters. Foreign worlds, after all, tend to alienate.

We do, however, struggle with the dread that comes with powerlessness. With the hunger for something unattainable, the hunger to even feel that desire in the first place. When the flames erupt, there is nowhere else to look, nothing else to contemplate. Yet when the ice melts, there is nowhere to stand, no dry place to breathe.

In Leverage, the ice is gone on the very first page. There is no preamble, no apology for what follows. It has melted so quickly that by the time we notice, we're already standing in water up to our necks, wondering how we got here, forgetting that the warnings were always there.

It’s not as if we’re being starved of warnings. Upon the release of Larry David’s infamous Dinner with Adolf essay, the New York Times issued a warning statement, claiming that all future satirical pieces would be “geared toward idea-driven, fact-based arguments.”

The point of the craft was never to sand edges down, though. Satire, Gowani told me, is not just an analytical craft, but one built of raw moments. It's built off of the lived experiences, the emotions, the empathy drawn between one another that we may not have yet to find. The idea that black and white has never been (and will never be) a binary, that the decisions contemplated are rarely laid out in clean, moral geometry.

Early reviewers have already struggled with their lack of sympathy. But that’s ok, it seems. Gowani won’t read any of them. He won’t beg for your sympathy. He’ll simply open a door to see if you’re ready to walk through it. To see if the space feels familiar. To see if the laughter rising in your throat carries, just faintly, the taste of copper.

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If you’d like to support Amran, LEVERAGE is out next Tuesday, August 19th. We both agree — the world needs more satire. Don’t get left behind!