BookBrowse Reviews A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani

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An elaborate, lightly drawn coming-of-age story about a teenager and her headstrong mother.

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A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani is narrated by Lara, a Black, biracial 16-year-old navigating an uneasy relationship with her Russian immigrant mother Yevgenia in early-2000s California. Lara seems, at least at first, to act more as a lens for others' actions and experiences than her own. Her relatively nondescript life is the vantage point from which we view the exuberant chaos of those around her as she approaches adulthood and develops a deeper understanding of her mother and the world.

Yevgenia is a whirlwind of self-important and attention-seeking, if extremely entertaining, behavior. Throughout a largely nomadic, working-class existence, she has managed many affairs and romances, including with Lara's father, a Cuban man Lara has never met, as well as a staggering amount of self-study. Yevgenia knows five languages that she toggles between as she revisits her favorite classic novels and works of philosophy. She fills notebooks with her own choice aphorisms, many of them warning against having sex with particular types of men ("Men who jabber on are men who don't read. They are needy men. Men who can't, or won't, satisfy in bed.") and others denigrating America. She maintains caches of friends and acquaintances in Rusty's, the bar where she works, the Oasis, the trailer park where she and Lara live, and elsewhere. She leaps at any opportunity to relate stories about herself in front of an audience.

Lara resents her mother's theatrical antics as well as Yevgenia's choice to keep her richly layered universe to herself. Yevgenia has never offered to teach her daughter Russian or any of the other languages she speaks, and she has neglected her in favor of romantic partners and her own freedom, once temporarily abandoning her for a relationship and another time abruptly ending her cohabitation with a kind, wealthy man who had bonded with Lara as a father figure. She also denies that antiblackness exists, even as she seeks revenge against those who have threatened or insulted her daughter for her race: "While Yevgenia never lets anyone forget that she's Russian, her take on Blackness is all American. She marvels at what she calls the ingenuity of, say, Black music or the rhythmic abilities of Black bodies, but when talk turns to racist practices in hiring or the need for more Black teachers, she'll complain that it's all politically correct nonsense."

After Yevgenia and Lara settle at the Oasis towards the beginning of the novel, Lara makes friends at a posh new school she has been ushered into by a fluke of districting: Julie, a white girl from a well-off suburban Christian family who shoplifts recreationally, and Charles, a Black aspiring poet who also lives at the Oasis. She becomes closest to Charles, who concocts plots to infiltrate the literary world and also to begin having sex with men (likely of whom Yevgenia would not approve), one of which involves him and Lara attending an open mic night at a bookstore where he fakes a British accent and pressures her into pretending to be French. Lara's friendship with Charles takes on a similar tenor to her relationship with her mother; she tries to please him by mimicking his intellectual airs but the two of them clash when she resists his schemes and aspirations. He accuses Lara of being prudish and uninterested in sex and therefore ruining it for other people; this isn't entirely true, and, in fact, Lara engages in a battle with her mother over the attentions of their model-handsome blond neighbor Steve, who struggles with alcoholism and caring for his young son Brody, a grubby and disheveled child to whom Lara comes to relate perhaps more than anyone else. Lara is jealous of her mother and Charles for their ability to move through life as seemingly freely as they do, but she also defines herself against the artifices they construct, not wanting to be dishonest in the way she thinks they are.

The novel's quirky mood suggests that it could be a fairly standard, humorous feel-good story that culminates in a reconciliation of differences between mother and daughter. But it's far sadder than that and better for it. Yevgenia's offbeat qualities are not just there for laughs — they are beautifully and devastatingly rendered — and she is objectively not a good parent. It seems unlikely even from the beginning that there is some sweeping redemption arc in store for her. Angel-Ajani opts out of simplistic signaling towards the sacredness of the mother-daughter bond but also declines ultimate judgment of Yevgenia, allowing the reader to sympathize with her as a person even if she is kind of a terrible mother.

A Country You Can Leave willingly adopts the structure of a coming-of-age story, full as it is of dramatic occurrences that serve as learning experiences, yet also skips lightly over this structure. It hits all of the expected beats with confidence, but with a muted quality, deftly filling the mold of a conventional novel more satisfyingly than many more conventional narratives do. For a while, it seems that the central movement of the story will hinge on Lara's search to find and meet with her father, and this plot element is accelerated when she learns additional information about him from Yevgenia. At another moment, it seems that a violent incident will represent a turning of the tide in Lara and Yevgenia's relationship. And it does, in a sense. But these happenings are, in their own cruel and colorful way, a kind of episodic realism that shows how events typically understood to be radically changing or revelatory often aren't, particularly for those living marginalized lives and to whom the general rules don't apply.

For Yevgenia, who returns to the same reading material and life stories over and over again, and for Angel-Ajani, the intricacies of storytelling seem to be the point. The book circles its circumstances, getting lost in its own horrors and delights, treading the same ground each time but always discovering new sights in the process.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in April 2023, and has been updated for the March 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.