Novelist Porochista Khakpour Drinks the Kool-Aid at a Hare Krishna Temple
In Porochista Khakpour’s debut novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, a coming-of-age story that may make its Iranian-American author the next Zadie Smith (the Times Book Review, Radar, and Paper are planning profiles), Khakpour, who grew up in Los Angeles before moving to New York, describes the exasperation of stern father Darius Adam at discovering that his wayward son Xerxes keeps little more than Fruity Pebbles in his Manhattan apartment. “Xerxes offered potato chips,” the passage goes, “which his father looked at as if he had never seen a Pringles can before, awestruck at his son’s supposedly adult living conditions.” Given that the novel is loosely autobiographical, we wondered about the living (and dining) conditions of the young novelist.