I think this my favorite of my novels. It is not the most elaborate, that would go to “The Unraveling.” Nor is it the best researched, that would go to “Lords of Misrule.” But my novel about Armenia, called “An Excess of Nationalism” (the title comes as a foreshadowing from the end of the novel), is the one that I feel most strongly about. The story of an old writer from Yerevan, who wants to write his Armenia book before he dies — like Mandelstam or Grossman — and then he can be done. To leave his legacy, his lasting piece of the ancient story of that even more ancient land, so that everyone knows that he had been there, that his short time on the earth did not pass unperceived.

I think for me, living in Yerevan for three years, that was what stuck out the most. On the one hand, when everything around you is measured in centuries, when the intrados of the crudely cut chapels are black with the soot of a millennium of worship candles, all lit one by one carrying prayers up to God — well how do you feel like you are so special, so unique, so different, so arrogant in a place where the story is long and the unbroken chain of human endeavors stretches back, back, back into the mists of forgotten time? Yet, then again, it is a land where names like Komitas and Khachaturian and Saryan and Charents and — the greatest of all — Tumanyan, are still whispered in reverence. When even they, when they walked the earth, also looked back at ancient names like Mashtots in wonder. It gives balance to the grasping and the greed (which are the two sensations that I most associate with America in the 2020s, and which is stressful).

“An Excess of Nationalism” is sort of for me like “The Great Gatsby” I imagine was for Fitzgerald. Short and simple but full of himself and the way he felt about the world.

I hope the novel goes viral and sells a million copies, for a couple of reasons. Reason one is that Armenia deserves the attention, deserves to be known like I got to know her, and protected because it is a place that is vulnerable but full of infinite charm. And two, I’d like to write my second and third Armenia novels: one would go back, way back, an epic about knights and fair maidens and ravaging armies; and one would go into the future, maybe even a utopia (when all around people are only writing dystopias these days). Buy your copy now, and share it, and have others buy theirs. That is how change happens, through the written word. The Armenians know this.