What is exile? A prolonged absence from one’s country imposed as a punitive measure, says Encyclopedia Britannica; from the Latin exsilium, a legal practice the Romans codified into gradations of banishment: temporary or permanent, with or without loss of citizenship or annulation of marriage, with or without confiscation of property. Of course, exile precedes the Romans by thousands of years, it has been with us since the beginning: in the first pages of Genesis, Adam and Eve decide to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and are exiled from Eden. As Joseph Brodsky, banished from the Soviet Union, said in a 1987 lecture titled “The Condition We Call Exile,” “we’ve got a pedigree”; and this pedigree includes Ovid, Dante, Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Nelly Sachs, Bertolt Brecht, Mahmoud Darwish, and so many more; and it is ever-growing.

No one tallies exiles, but it is safe to say that their—or, I should now say, our—ranks constitute a fraction of the more than 110 million people forcibly displaced from their homes, including the millions fleeing the abattoirs of Palestine, Haiti, and Sudan, of Ukraine and Syria and Mali. Yet literature by and about exiles abounds—no less, says Brodsky, “because of the ancient and perhaps as yet unfounded belief that, were the masters of this world better read, the mismanagement and grief that make millions hit the road could be somewhat reduced.” Or, as Hisham Matar writes in his new novel, My Friends, because exile is “a thermometer of our times.”

*

In late January, I hosted a dinner for my closest friends in Philadelphia, where I live; we try to gather for a meal every week. The gathering is a tradition born of Covid lockdown solitudes; we call it “family dinner.” After the meal, we decided to look on Google Maps at where each of us had grown up through the virtual reality goggles my partner had brought that night. We were excited: VR was new to most of us, and only my two married friends had ever seen each other’s childhood homes. But quickly, the mood in the room became somber. S. had not known that the house his father built in a South African township had been demolished, a very different house now in its stead. A brand-new picket fence obscured A.’s little house in Hawai’i. The West Baltimore neighborhood of my partner’s youth turned out to be a blighted ghost town, his high school shuttered. I looked around the melancholy room and thought: This is a metaphor for the inaccessibility of our childhoods.

“Exile,” writes Brodsky, “is a metaphysical condition. At least, it has a very strong, very clear metaphysical dimension.” I did not know this at the time, but the day of that family dinner, Russian security services in Yekaterinburg arrested Ksenia Karelina, a thirty-two-year-old, Russian-born US citizen, for the treasonous act of donating fifty dollars to a Ukrainian charity. Karelina, who lives in California, had come to Central Russia to visit her grandmother, parents, and younger sister; as of this writing, she is in prison, facing a twenty-year sentence in a Russian penal colony. Twenty years: this is how long I have lived in the United States, where I came of my own volition and on my own terms, leaving behind my own grandmother, parents, and younger sister. I have publicly criticized Putin’s totalitarian regime, but every few years, I have nonetheless returned to St. Petersburg to visit my family. In the VR goggles, the graceful neoclassical façades of the intersection where I grew up looked exactly the same as they had when I last saw them. But Karelina’s arrest—a warning for Putin’s critics abroad—taught me that I was no longer free to visit that beautiful intersection unpunished. The news of her arrest changed the metaphysical condition of my geography: I found myself, suddenly, in exile.

*

What it means to leave home voluntarily and become an exile in absentia is the focus of Matar’s My Friends. Here we find the narrator, Khaled, a high school student in Benghazi, who, in the early pages of the novel, encounters a short story by a Libyan writer living in exile: “We tried to imagine him not being able to return home. I remember my mother gazing into the middle distance and saying, to no one in particular, ‘A nightmare.’”

Three years later, Khaled leaves Benghazi to attend the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. A few months later—politically aware but by no means an activist—he attends an anti-Qaddafi demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy in London’s St. James’s Square and is shot and wounded. There are cameras; the violence is documented; Khaled knows that Qaddafi’s henchmen must have seen him among the crowd, that he is now a marked man, that he may not return to Libya, to his parents and younger sister. My Friends is Khaled’s recounting of the thirty years that follow, thirty years of trying to find footing in exile—and the vocabulary for it:

Violence demands translation. I will never have the words to explain what it is like to be shot, to lose the ability to return home or to give up on everything I expected my life to be, or why it felt as though I had died that day in St. James’s Square and, through some grotesque accident, been reborn into the hapless shoes of an eighteen-year-old castaway, stranded in a foreign city where he knew no one and could be little use to himself, that all he could just about manage was to march through each day, from beginning to end, and then do it again. I did not know how to say such things then, I still do not.

“What I want to return to,” writes Khaled, who becomes a teacher in London, “I cannot return to because the place and I have changed.” Of course, we are all exiles from the past, that is one thing we have in common, and any of us can arguably make the same statement—including my friends looking for their childhood homes through VR goggles in my living room. Time is the mightiest banisher. But Khaled’s predicament haunts precisely because it is unexpected and, in its arbitrary cruelty, can never be put right—here Matar, who was born in London to Libyan parents and whose father was disappeared by the Qaddafi regime, returns to the main subject of his literary oeuvre: an unresolvable missing, an incompletable search. My Friends portrays exile as a macabre and haunting variation on childhood as a land of no return.

*

In this historical moment, with millions fleeing imminent death around the globe, it feels almost petty to single out exile, especially one that is fairly successful by most standards. And maybe this is true for any historical moment. “Whatever the motives, origins, and destinations of these people are,” Brodsky said in that 1987 lecture, “one thing is absolutely clear: they make it very difficult to talk with a straight face about the plight of the writer in exile.” Yet he insists on talking about it, not least because literature “is a dictionary of the language in which life speaks to man”; it “must make it easier for the next man, if we can’t make it safer.” This is why sometimes literature magically finds us at precisely the time when we need this dictionary at our fingertips, as My Friends found me: it arrived in the mail the day after that family dinner, the day after Karelina’s arrest, the day I learned that I could no longer return safely to the country of my birth.

In the three decades of Khaled’s exile, his life is interwoven with those of two friends: Mustafa al Touny, a fellow student and protestor, and Hosam Zowa, a slightly older writer, the one whose short story Khaled had encountered as a teenager in Benghazi. Their camaraderie, their breakups and reunions, braid into what Matar, in his acknowledgments at the end of the book, describes as “the emotional country that certain deep friendships can resemble.”

Here it is, then, the origin of the novel’s title and of those weekly family dinners in Philadelphia. While, as Matar writes, “where an exile chooses to live is inevitably arbitrary,” close friendships represent a constancy that a place can no longer provide. “The best I could have hoped for,” Khaled says of Hosam, “was that my friend would live near me for as long as it was possible for him to remain in one place . . . I could never take his companionship as granted.”

*

Given a choice, I would not want to live in Russia, though of course I find myself missing it more now, now that I am barred from it. Khaled is deeply nostalgic for Libya, and he longs for his family, the streets of his Benghazi. Then the Arab Spring begins, and both Mustafa and Hosam return to Benghazi. But even after Qaddafi’s regime finally falls and Libya is no longer off-limits, Khaled chooses not to go back. (Brodsky, who outlived the Soviet Union by four years, also never returned to his beloved St. Petersburg.) “Why have you not come home?” Khaled’s mother asks him, and he is forced to articulate the stunting that exile can perpetrate:

My mouth was full and empty all at once. Empty because everything in it had no shape or wound or form. And full of everything that I felt then and feel now . . . what I have built here might be feeble and meek, but it took everything I had and I fear if I leave I will not have the will to return and then I will be lost again and I have been lost before and I will do everything not to be that again and that I do not know if it is cowardly or courageous and I do not care and I have decided without deciding, because it is my only option, to keep to the days, to sleep when it is good for me to sleep and wake in good time to attend to my work and the people who depend on me. . . . And I wanted to tell her that flying, being divorced from the earth, was like being separated from her and, now that I am on land, I never ever want to be unearthed again and that I am ashamed of it and was ashamed of it for a long time but now I am no longer.

*

I am very fond of Matar’s work; A Month in Siena, his meditation on loss and art, to me is transcendent. But while My Friends felt urgent as I read it, it also felt somehow underwhelming, as if, as a novel, it was not quite there. When I told a friend in mid-February—I was three-quarters of the way through the book then, it was slow going—that I was not particularly taken by it, he laughed and pointed at the dozens of sticky notes I had already sprinkled throughout the pages. I explained that I had marked the passages that resonated with me even if I did not think the novel as a whole was particularly strong, the same way that aspects of Russia resonate with me even if I do not ever intend to live there. But I find myself returning to this book as months of exile accrue, as I search for anchorage. (“Some books, like some people, are shy,” Matar writes.) It is possible that individual thought-wisdoms are remedial to a novel that otherwise doesn’t quite coalesce. Or maybe it is me who is not quite coalescing, in my newfound bewilderment. Or maybe I, specifically, was meant to read My Friends as a dictionary and a guide: how, after twenty years of living away from the land of my childhood, to survive in this new country called exile.