Benard, Cheryl 1953-

views updated

BENARD, Cheryl 1953-

PERSONAL: Born 1953, in New Orleans, LA; married Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad (U.S. envoy to Afghanistan); children: Alexander, Max.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Publicity Director, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Square W., New York, NY 10001.

CAREER: Writer, consultant, and sociologist. Bltzmann Institute, Vienna, Austria, research director; consultant on Middle Eastern affairs for RAND Corporation.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

The Moghul Buffet, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1998.

Turning on the Girls, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2001.

NONFICTION

(With Zalmay Khalilzad) "The Government of God": Iran's Islamic Republic, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1984.

(With Daniel Byman and others) Strengthening the Partnership: Improving Military Coordination with Relief Agencies and Allies in Humanitarian Operations, RAND Corporation (Washington, DC), 2000.

Veiled Courage: Inside the Afghan Women's Resistance, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals and author of nonfiction books, primarily on women's issues, published in German. Benard's work has been translated into several languages, indlucing Spanish and Turkish.

SIDELIGHTS: Scholar and author Cheryl Benard lives on two continents, speaks two languages, and, as a sociologist, works as the research director for the Boltzmann Institute in Vienna, Austria. Additionally, she works as a consultant for the RAND Corporation think tank—specifically, the Center for Middle East Public Policy in Washington, D.C. Interestingly, Benard's nonfiction books written in German, have also appeared in Spanish, Turkish, French, Hungarian, and Russian; the one language in which she has never published books about women's issues is English.

Benard met her husband, Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, at the University of Chicago when he was working on his doctorate. They have two children and live in North Potomac, Maryland, but Benard also maintains a home in Austria. Talking to an Amazon.com interviewer about how she went from writing scholarly articles as an assistant professor to writing fiction, Benard said, "it didn't seem right to take interesting material, lively interviews, and absorbing case histories and then publish them only in dry professional journals, so I wrote a popular version of my first research project, it was well received and I just kept going on that path."

Benard's first novel published in the United States, Moghul Buffet, is set in the border frontier town of Peshwar, Pakistan. The story focuses on several characters: Mara Blake, an American who works in a refugee camp and struggles to recover from her broken marriage to a Pakistani aristocrat; the Maulana, an Islamic fundamentalist televangelist; Fatima, the Maulana's young mistress and housemaid; and his nephew and chauffeur, Mushahed, an economics student who has fallen in love with Fatima. A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked that although Benard's novel had great potential, "the author's deft blend of humor and suspense lapses into a confusing tangle of subplots." Jo Manning, however, reviewing the novel for Library Journal, noted that "Benard debuts with a surprisingly successful black comedy/mystery reminiscent in its droll narrative style of the works of Australian author Peter Carey." In addition, a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that "Benard nimbly swings from farce to social satire."

Benard's second novel, Turning on the Girls, is part science fiction, part feminist comedy. The story takes place in the middle of the twenty-first century, ten years after women have taken over the world. In this new world order, aromatherapy is used in the workplace, and an entire bureaucracy is devoted to deprogramming men and women of patriarchal thought patterns. Lisa, the protagonist, is an operative of the Ministry of Thought, whose task is to find an acceptable sexual fantasy for women. In the process, she infiltrates Harmony, a counterrevolutionary men's movement, with Justin, her administrative assistant. A Booklist reviewer commented, "If Dorothy Parker had written Brave New World, it might have resembled Benard's satiric vision of a utopia designed and run by women." Janelle Brown, in Salon.com, found the novel, at times, "laugh-out-loud funny," particularly when it mocks gender theory; however, Brown also remarked that Benard's "plot gets so convoluted that it's impossible to follow, and even more difficult to care." A Publishers Weekly contributor, meanwhile, remarked, "this contra-Atwoodesque social fiction may satirize political correctness, but it also manages to salute present and future feminist triumphs, albeit in a roundabout fashion."

In a Borders Books Web site online interview, Benard told Jessica Jernigan: "I wanted to write a realistic utopian novel. So I took what I know about feminism and about women's ways of approaching things, including the annoying and exasperating parts, and extrapolated. They tend to be meddlesome, to micro-manage, to know what's best for everybody, to be on the hypersensitive alert at all times, to lack a sense of humor, and to be competitive and back-stabbing while pretending they're not. There's a politburo aspect to organized feminism."