Review: Waiting for Beirut

Attempting to Break the Cycle 
Review: Waiting for Beirut

Chloe Joy
​
Rebecca Dimyan
Novel
Running Wild Press, pp. 262
Cost: $19.99

People's experiences from childhood immensely shape the kind of person they may become and can impact their decision-making later on in adulthood. Some children with complicated upbringings often tell themselves they’ll do better than their parents, learning from their mistakes. However, some cycles are harder to break, and those kids can unknowingly become exactly like their parents. In her debut novel, Waiting for Beirut, Rebecca Dimyan explores themes of generational trauma by artfully creating subtle patterns to produce a beautifully tragic narrative.

Set during the 1950s and spanning numerous years, readers follow George Lahoud, a closeted queer Lebanese-American man, as he navigates through his life after receiving a letter from his brother explaining that their father is dying. George wistfully gives up his dreams of becoming a doctor and drops out of college to take over the family business. With his return, George’s father quickly pressures him to get married and have a son. So, George disregards his attraction to men and marries a plain but wealthy Lebanese woman. However, while on his honeymoon in Beirut, he meets an enchanting Greek man, sparking a romance he could never have before.

George is one of those kids who believes he is smarter than his father and therefore thinks he can better himself. While away at college for two years, with zero contact with his family, he is able to thrive and begins to break the cycle of becoming like his father. It is the moment he goes home and is surrounded by a parental presence that George falls back into unhealthy habits. From the very first page, Dimyan utilizes a pattern of alcohol consumption to illustrate this descent. But not just any type of alcohol: it’s always gin. It is a very effective technique because through the specificity of gin, Dimyan compels readers to pay closer attention to the growing frequency of George leaning on alcohol in times of stress, as his father did during his childhood. As the story progresses and George begins to depend more on alcohol to cope with the dissatisfactions of his life, Dimyan integrates gin into her descriptions, such as “gin-soaked banter” (26), “I glowed gin pink” (100), and “The night was made of gin and shadows” (222). This unique way of implementing the pattern of gin into the story makes it clear to readers how consuming alcohol is to both his life and mind.

Another impressive pattern Dimyan establishes early on is in the names of her characters, which she brings back at the end to make the narrative come full circle and also to extend the possibility of the cycle of generational trauma continuing. As the reader learns from the first line of Chapter One—“George Lahoud, my father, my bayee, was a butcher and a drunk” (6)—George’s namesake is his father. By choosing to give them the same name, Dimyan sets up the parallels that are to come and places the idea into readers’ minds that George is destined to repeat history and live a similar life as his father. When Eleanor and George have their son, Dimyan also chooses to give him the name George, referred to as Georgie. This could indicate that Georgie is next to fall subject to the cycle. Additionally, and most interestingly to me, once a reader finishes the book, they can go back to that first line and read it from the perspective of Georgie, which further implies that the cycle could continue.

Dimyan keeps the ending of her novel ambiguous and open-ended, having George build the courage to talk to his son—who is now in medical school like George was—after being estranged for fourteen years, not looking for forgiveness, but simply acknowledgement. The reader is left to ponder these questions: Will Georgie be able to evade his destiny of gin filled resentment and regrets? Or will reconnecting with his father, as George did with his own father, propel that destiny? The denial of answers gives readers an essential choice in how they interpret the ending. Dimyan allows readers to either give power to cycles if they believe Georgie is walking right in George’s footsteps or give power to breaking cycles if they think this reconciliation is just enough to grant George access in his son’s life without ruining it.

Despite the novel taking place decades ago, it stands as a timeless narrative that can provide readers with warning signs of being looped back into cycles which they can learn from. Waiting for Beirut is not just a personal account of generational trauma and how cycles can persist no matter how hard one tries to run from them; it is also a mirror for readers to look at and reflect on their own experiences, to see the signs George missed and have us acknowledge the signs in our lives we may be ignoring before it is too late. Through Dimyan’s heart wrenching portrayal of how cycles can ruin a person and their relationships, she still offers hope at the end that cycles can be broken. The choice lies within the reader’s hands.