Betty Shamieh's 'Too Soon' intertwines three generations of Palestinian American women

A grandmother, a daughter, a granddaughter: “Too Soon,” Betty Shamieh’s uneven but vibrantly affecting debut novel highlights three generations of Palestinian American women. Told in rotating sections, each with a distinctive first-person voice, this tale spans two continents and more than six decades of cultural and political change.

The primary story around which the other two revolve is that of 35-year-old Arabella. Shamieh has created a dynamic divided timeline, which progresses in weeks for Arabella in 2012 and in years for her mother (1970s through 1990s) and grandmother (1948 through the 1960s). This creates a strong narrative mix: a pressing what-will-happen-next tension and a panorama of history for what has helped to form the present.

Arabella is an off-Broadway director who specializes in gender and race bending productions of Shakespeare. To her surprise, she has accepted a job of directing a production of “Hamlet” in Ramallah in the West Bank. Up to now, Arabella has carefully avoided all political activity, determined to be seen as an artist, not a Palestinian American artist.

And yet, she does realize that her heritage in part informs her view of the world, herself and yes, sometimes her art. A directing job in the city that holds her family’s roots has the potential to provide some revelations and even necessitate some life-altering decisions.

Part of the joy in reading fiction, often like a pleasurable unease, is getting inside the thought process of a character as they make choices. In seeing, sometimes before the character does, how a decision will expand or contract their life. This novel brims with such scenarios; they feel genuine because Shamieh is adept at showing decisions made within a constrained religious or cultural framework, how so many elements beyond the control of a character influence their choice.

A few factors tip the scale for Arabella to say yes. The directing offer carries a lot of creative freedom, and as a personal bonus, in the region right now is Aziz, a 30-something doctor with whom she previously felt a romantic spark. This, in spite of the fact that he also fits her mother and grandmother’s profile as the perfect match for her. (Arabella considers her grandmother “part of a vast network of displaced Palestinian matriarchs … whose sole purpose was to ensure their children married other Palestinians.”)

Arabella is frank to a fault with herself and everyone else. She remembers that when considering a career in theater, she had “eschewed the glamour of acting for the power of directing. I liked being in charge.” Her breezily sardonic tone is an entertaining counterbalance to family histories often weighed down by political trauma.

The author shares some professional biographical elements with her main character; Shamieh is a Palestinian American writer and playwright who has written 15 plays, including a Broadway production of “Malvolio,” a sequel to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

Shamieh holds degrees from Harvard and from the Yale School of Drama and was also named as a Playwriting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. She is a founding artistic director of The Semitic Root, which, according to the publisher’s author page, is “a collective that supports innovative theater cocreated by Arab and Jewish Americans.”

A striking aspect of “Too Soon” is the two-sided nature of its narrative.

Generation by generation, the women in this family gain more freedom within their cultural heritage. Arabella’s grandmother Zoya grew up in a time when, as she remembers, “men cursed the birth of daughters.” Though a precocious student and a talented writer, she was forced to leave school at a very young age to marry and have children. Two generations later, Arabella is the first woman in the family to attend college and forge a professional career.

But their homeland remains in chaos, and Shamieh skillfully shows how, generation after generation, this shadows their lives. In 1948, Zoya flees Ramallah with her husband and family at the creation of the Israeli state. They settle in Detroit, and in the ensuing decades build a comfortable life. Yet, the upheaval of their emigration, and that, as Zoya mourns, their homeland being “erased off maps” leaves emotional scars that can’t help but distort relationships.

Zoya’s daughter Naya, who was a child when they fled, is the most poignant and most unknowable of the three women. She is a rebellious girl who develops into a hesitant, insecure woman. Even though she lives a pampered life with her husband and children in the exclusive Silicon Valley enclave of Atherton, Naya can never shake the fear that in a moment it all could be taken away, that they’d have to “start over from the bottom and claw our way back to the top.”

Her view of the world as consisting of winners and losers, with her people always the most vulnerable, makes her unable to maintain close friendships with adults or meaningful relationships with her children.

In a story, it’s difficult to give depth to a character who has defaulted to a safe focus on material goods and financial competitiveness. Even with generous period details, Naya’s story remains stubbornly at the surface, her character feeling more like a vehicle for dramatizing events of these eras — the women’s movement during the 1970s and the fast-growing wealth of Silicon Valley in the 1980s — than as an individual experiencing these events.

In the present-day, Arabella’s story is convincingly underlaid with heightened political tensions in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Upon arrival, she is detained for hours at Ben Gurion Airport for a very minor matter. (Aziz later notes “They want to make it unpleasant for you to return so you do it less often.”) She is considered suspect by her Arab neighbors because she is a woman living alone. Through it all, the scenes of the play rehearsals, with a mix of outsized egos and cultural tensions and a deep love of theater, are wonderfully done.

Arabella is increasingly torn between her attraction to Aziz, her art, and some reawakened feelings about her family and her cultural heritage. In ways she has never done before, Arabella needs to consider what are her real priorities, and how to make them work together. Unbeknownst to Arabella, her mother and grandmother are each facing some large questions of their own.

As all three timelines begin to merge, the pace quickens to the point of feeling rushed. But even with a shortened literary landing strip, “Too Soon” is rich in history, wit and heart. Shamieh’s assured voice tells a complicated story in nuanced and meaningful ways.