It is clear that "A Stopping Place," by A. G. Mojtabai, is a tragic comedy of cultures. (p. 558)

[The author] who lived for several years in Iran and Pakistan … uses East and West to indict one another.

In "A Stopping Place," Miss Mojtabai uses her local color well. She turns the experience of foreignness into a feeling of being lost, of being assaulted by metaphors….

The expected riot or invasion [which provides the tension in the novel] is the result of a theft, from a shrine, of a holy relic.

The relic is a hair of the prophet Muhammad. In the East, we are reminded, a hair can cause a war, because every man, as Henri Michaux said about India, is an ecclesiastic. Everything is holy. In America, we understand, nothing is sacred.

This secondary plot is the undoing of "A Stopping Place." Intended as counterpoint, the two...