LeClair's interest in language and in the intricate complexities of narrated truth are clear throughout Well-Founded Fear , just as they were in his earlier novel Passing Off , a story of intrigue set in Greece and narrated by an American basketball player whose game is deception. Whereas that story moves from a straightforward situation to a predicament so complicated that it takes a master of razzle dazzle to cope with it, the lawyer's job is to make sense of a situation that seems hopelessly complicated from the start. At times Mahan's deliberations with the language and with potential narrative scenarios seem to be more a product of LeClair's concerns with his novel than of his character's problems with her job, but that's the advantage of having a narrator who must write to tell her story. Mahan's main problem, like that of most refugees, is to provide documents to support her contentions. As the attorney knows, however, almost everything she claims is subject to interpretation.
Nothing proves anything.
And yet, by reading this novel, most people will learn more about the Kurds than they would have found out any other way.