His father is a patriot; his mother, not so much. One of many vividly drawn secondary characters, she makes the aromatic Lahori hoof stew of her homeland, yet loves David Letterman and polka. His Auntie Asma, a college professor who encourages his literary aspirations, tells him she adored Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” but hated his “The Satanic Verses” for its “sickening” attacks on the Prophet Muhammad. “I mean, this is what we have to expect? From Salman? From one of us?” she fumes one night over an expensive bottle of wine in a swanky restaurant.

Then there’s Uncle Shafat, victim of a hate crime, who doesn’t feel safe in America until he converts to Christianity and marries a white woman. And a childhood friend, Ramla, who is forced to wear a hijab but knows all the words to “Thriller.”

Before the book was published, the real Ayad Akhtar — recently named the new president of PEN America — said he wrote it in “a fever dream” after his mother died, Donald Trump was elected, and his father started showing signs of decline.

He wanted to remember what brought his parents’ generation to the United States, how the country changed, and what those changes meant for all of them. The result is a searingly honest, brutally funny, sometimes painful-to-read account of being a Muslim in America before and after 9/11.