Jamal Smith: what a name. All those Smiths, Macquaries, Bradleys and Grants – and how many of them named Jamal? The Jamals have Ahmad, jazz pianist – and Jamal Crawford, Jamal Idris and Jamal Woolard. Protagonist, authorial avatar, young man’s portrait, Jamal Smith is in good fictional company, too: incongruous anglicisms as monikers range from Brian Castro’s Seamus O’Young to Zadie Smith’s Alex-Li Tandem. You’re probably thinking you’d like to be a Jamal, too, but Omar Sakr would discourage you. Being a Jamal is hard, he’d say.    ‘‘ The social novel,’’ American critic Irving Howe wrote, ‘‘ the Bildungsroman, the novel of manners – all place or locate their characters in a society palpable and populated, resembling (but how much and in what ways?) the actual world; all endow their characters with names such as actual persons might have (Buddenbrook, Vronsky, Hurstwood, Benjy, not Everyman, Christian, Joseph K.); and all treat the self as a precious reserve or fragile hypothesis of individuality, while acknowledging that it is also a social creation formed through our relations with others.’’    This is true – but how much and in what ways? Of Jamal, with his own ‘‘ fragile hypothesis of individuality’ ’ and name ‘‘ such as actual persons might have’ ’ (his Lebanese grandfather having subbed out the Khaddaj surname upon arrival in Australia), we get a few key details. In Jamal’s neck of the (western Sydney) woods, everything that doesn’t begin with cars and end with money is usually deemed ‘‘ gay’’ . The taboo is harder to face when embodied in a family member (notwithstanding that, in Jamal’s case, ‘‘ bisexual’ ’ may be more accurate).  Self-sacrifice is the order of the day, in everything from one’s hidden sexuality to the money provided to family – as demonstrated by his friend Ilo, whose income, earned as a McDonald’s shift manager, ‘‘ went to his parents to help pay the bills, or to give to their church ... he rarely had anything left over for himself’’ .  The environment is sacrificed too: local bus seats (‘‘ gum-blotted , cig-burned’’ ), and a PE staffroom (burnt down ‘‘ not once, not twice, but three times’’ , less as an act of vandalism than a civic attempt to ensure that the building gets renovated). After travelling to meet his estranged father in Turkey, Jamal’s return to Australia provokes a ‘‘ deluge of memory and judgment’’ .  The reader’s judgment of Jamal’s story comes from knowing more about him than he does: his self-conception as a slight, effete, artistic being is constantly undermined; only the last descriptor is close to the truth (his friend Emir dubs him ‘‘ a masc Leb’’ ). While eating food from Lebanon that ‘‘ looked like swamp water’ ’ and makes Jamal want to vomit, his mother Hala tells him that he should ‘‘ just pretend’ ’ to like it, neatly summarising the skill Jamal is normally adept at.  His is an attempt to reconcile interior and exterior perceptions in a country where, as in Ouyang Yu’s work, the bigotry of one’s own culture is matched only by the bigotries of the culture one has migrated to. ‘‘[ S]ome part of him had been trying to tell them’’ , Sakr writes, during the ponderous witchhunt of the same-sex marriage vote – but his family sees ‘‘ only the rude Leb, already a man, baiting them’’ . Outside the family lies, in Sakr’s lovely phrase, ‘‘ the negative will of strange millions’’ .  So, Son of Sin, the first novel by the awardwinning poet, is both a kind of social work, detailing aspects of life in western Sydney, and a Bildungsroman, albeit one that takes an individual – Jamal and his family – as a synecdoche for the society they inhabit. The Bildungsroman’s form is telescoped down to the part that so often forms its most compelling aspect: the chapters about the protagonist’s youth.  In one of the book’s most comic and affecting passages, Jamal attempts to speak with a Turkish functionary at a funeral home, but finds himself unable to say anything about his father’s age, address or marital status – only proclaiming his ignorance in English, the foreign language. When his father’s body, ‘‘ pale as starlight’’ , is wheeled out and ‘‘ a hundred strangefamiliars wept on Jamal’’ , the reader does not know whether to laugh or to join them.  ‘‘ Your life is like a soap opera,’’ Jamal’s friends tell him, ‘‘ because there were too many characters, too much death, nothing at all like the kind of spare, elegant novels they studied in school. He had forgotten more life than those books and their writers had bothered to imagine.’’  Speaking of biography and identity – and what writers might bother to imagine – Howe concluded that, from Fielding to Garcia Marquez, ‘‘ most efforts to provide histories of a character’s life consist of brisk, often scrappy summary’’ .  ‘‘ A full-scale fictional biography is rare,’’ he said. With Son of Sin, Sakr is happy to prove him wrong.  The Age 4 March 2022