This promising if uneven first novel focuses on a Jordanian widower and his grown daughters as they try to make a home for themselves in upstate New York. Struggling to locate their place in American culture, Matussem, Melvina and Jemorah also cope with Fatima, Matussem's meddlesome sister, who is forever trying to marry off her nieces. Abu-Jaber successfully depicts the family's anomie, the discomfort they feel both in their ancestral land and in the States. On the other hand, she shows just how Americanized they have become--Matussem moonlights as a jazz drummer (``The Big Band Sound of Mat Ramoud and the Ramoudettes''), the daughters congregate with co-workers at the bar Won Ton a Go-Go. The work falters, however, in unconvincing descriptions of Jem's semi-romantic involvements with a gas-station attendant and a big-talking mathematician/pool hustler. And at times the larger-than-life portrayal of Jordanian relatives clinging to ethnic customs borders on caricature. But Abu-Jaber's sobering, shocking revelations of the hardships long buried as family secrets in the Old Country serve as proof of her narrative powers. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This novel explores the lives of the members of an Arab American family, a father and his two daughters, living in upstate New York. They are, as the saying goes, caught between two worlds, maintaining the vestiges of a traditional family structure but without the social setting or the rituals to make it work. What holds them together, instead, is their continual mourning for the girls' Irish American mother, who died 20 years earlier. The father, Matussem, is a Palestinian who immigrated from Jordan and is an off-hours jazz drummer in love with American kitsch. His love is shared by his oldest daughter, Jemorah, who is nearly 30 and unmarried but drawn to Ricky, the gas-station attendant down the street. The younger daughter, Melvina, is, at 22, the head nurse at the local hospital where her father and sister also work. Melvina embraces her job thoroughly, with a fanatical sense of mission. Her insistence on cleanliness and decency--her personal response to her mother's death, so it is revealed--make for some interesting conflicts with Matussem's and Jemorah's dreaminess. Arabian Jazz is a compelling look at the odd ways members of families, Arab or otherwise, find to get along with each other. ~--Martha Schoolman

You're an Arab-American writing about your community in your first novel. Should you go for a comic/satirical treatment? Do something more serious, emphasizing cultural displacement? Or broaden your canvas to include the white, nonethnic neighbors? Abu- Jaber has tried all three tacks and been overwhelmed in the process. The Ramoud family, father and two grown daughters, live in a small town in upstate New York and work at the same hospital in Syracuse. The father, Matussem, emigrated from Jordan as a young man and fell in love with and married Nora, an Irish-American who interpreted his new country for him. Since her death from typhus on a trip to Jordan, the gentle, passive Matussem has found a refuge in jazz (he's a drummer with his own group) and caring for his daughters. The younger, Melvina, is no problem; only 22, she's already Head Nurse. But Jemorah, the protagonist by default in this plotless novel, is another story. Stuck in a clerical job she hates, Jem's pushing 30 and still single, which is driving her Aunt Fatima nuts. (Fatima, whose life's ambition is to join the worthy Arab matrons on the Ladies' Pontifical Committee, is the main satirical target here.) None of Jem's three possible mates is very plausible. There's Gilbert Sesame, a fast-talking pool hustler who's here one minute, gone the next; Ricky Ellis, a local grease monkey with whom Jem makes love in the bushes; and cousin Nassir, fresh from Jordan, who warns Jem about her extended family, ``a cult organization.'' Eventually, after two crudely engineered encounters with bigots, she decides that postgraduate research into race prejudice is the answer. The other elements in this mishmash (visiting Jordanians on a credit-card rampage, poor whites tormenting themselves with coathangers and booze) only add to the confusion.