Complicity Becomes Us | Los Angeles Review of Books

Matthew D. LaPlante considers the perils of complicity in Boris Fishman’s novel “The Unwanted.”

IT’S EASY to imagine that we would be the ones to stand up, speak out, and resist. But that’s seldom what happens when the rule of law is supplanted by a hierarchy of fear. First, our moral vocabularies begin to shrink, edging us ever closer to an aphasia of our principles. Next, we begin to look warily at those who still insist on conscience. Little by little, we submit. And then, when the knock comes at our neighbor’s door instead of our own, we congratulate ourselves for having identified the safest course of action.

Boris Fishman’s somber third novel, The Unwanted (2025), is a powerful allegory for why this surrender is the default posture of humanity. The protagonist, George, is a university professor in an unnamed country. A member of the minority sect, George first debases himself by agreeing to teach the poetry of the dominant sect. He reckons that each additional compromising step is a choice to keep his family safe a little longer as his nation’s leader attempts to protect the country from “vermin.” In fact, at the novel’s start, he has done little better than call the coin flip a few times in a row. There are no real choices here.

“If you stayed, you might be killed for staying […] If you left, you might be killed for leaving,” writes Fishman. And so George has stayed, falling ever deeper into complicity as those around him begin to disappear. When he appears to lose this Niemöllerian game of musical chairs and has to flee, it might seem clear that he could have taken a stand much earlier. But the horrific effects of refugee life on his wife, Susanna, and their eight-year-old daughter, Dina, are the very consequences he was trying to prevent, and we are left to reckon with the virtue of delaying the inevitable.

George’s choices may be impossible, but Fishman never lets him off the hook for what he has done to his people and, consequently, what he has done to his family. Nor does the tangled narrative absolve anyone. In Fishman’s world, rebels against the regime are the next iteration of brutal leaders. International aid workers who at first appear purehearted are quick to turn monstrous toward refugees who aren’t the right kind of victim.

Even Susanna is implicated for her complicity, which comes first when she acquiesces to her husband’s decision to stay and serve the state, accepting the salary and safety that come with his job. Later, in an asylum interview, she becomes even more actively compromised, lying about the actions of an innocent man to further her family’s case for refugee status.

The cruelties that Fishman inflicts upon his protagonists also extend to his readers. He is nearly unsparing in his descriptions of violence, odors, body horror, and sexual assault. He jumps erratically from scene to scene, time period to time period, and character to character, often omitting details that could help the transitions feel less jarring. And then, in the final third of the book, he almost completely abandons two of the family members who have, up to that point, shared equally in the narrative.

This is clearly intentional; it offers us a shared experience of fear, disgust, anger, disorientation, and loss. It is thus an appreciable objective. It is unlikely, though, that many readers will find that the opportunity to have the meagerest taste of these characters’ experiences is worth the cost to narrative clarity.

The same cost-benefit analysis might be applied to Fishman’s anachronistic approach to the setting. At the novel’s outset, the era feels as though it could have been set in any of the last few decades of the 20th century. But we get clues along the way—the existence of YouTube, the presence (but not ubiquity) of cell phones—that seem to root us in the early 21st. This is further complicated by the author’s decision to avoid naming most of the places where his story is set and to assign fictional names to others, even as he acknowledges the existence of still other places that do exist in the real world—most notably the United States, where George wishes to emigrate with his family.

All of this leaves readers in an uncanny valley, wherein we are unable to excuse ourselves from the possibility that the characters’ story could be our story but also unable to fully ground George, Susanna, Dina, and the people around them in a familiar world. These experimental missteps aside, Fishman is a journeyman novelist who knows how to keep a narrative moving. He is especially adept at ensuring all of Chekhov’s guns get brandished, if not fired. A third of the way in, it’s clear that there will be no detail that doesn’t have the potential to be relevant, often in amusing ways. That humor is appreciated in a book that is otherwise so morose and so deeply morally challenging.

The author also makes good use of his decision to write from three dominant perspectives. This approach offers opportunities for some clever twice- and thrice-told revelations and prompts the reader to reflect on the fallibility of memory, the unpredictability of motives, and the limitations of perception. However, it also leaves George, Susanna, and Dina less developed than each character might be in a story with a more singular perspective.

Fishman’s skill and experience (his novels A Replacement Life [2014] and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo [2016] were both New York Times “Notable Books of the Year,” and the former won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) suggest that these challenges are features, not bugs. And his shrewd and soaring prose may, for some readers, render these subjective flaws moot. It’s true that some of Fishman’s choices yanked me from a mesmeric reader state, but so too did lines that I simply found so clever, compelling, politically astute, and philosophically poignant that I could not help but step back into consciousness to scribble a note. Other readers who also happen to be writers may be similarly afflicted; Fishman is that good with his pen.

Although Fishman has been publicly critical of the notion that fictionists should stick closely to their own experiences, he most often writes from his own. His family came to the United States as refugees from the Soviet Union when he was nine, and he has said that his experience waiting for the authorities to decide his fate while staying in a refugee hotel in Italy informed his latest novel.

If there was any character in the story that we could expect him to offer mercy to, then, it would be Dina, who is roughly that same age for most of the book. But not even the young girl is spared responsibility for what happens; it’s impossible to disentangle her family’s misery—and that of many other people they encounter—from the decisions she makes along the way. In this world, not even children get a pass on complicity.