BINGO: “citizen,” as the questions of visa and citizenship and being able to stay in the US (or what to do when you can’t) occupy much of the mindspace and drives the plot.right so coming back here–I am on a mission to complete a Cannonball Read Bingo card, and this is obviously a super win re: the citizenship prompt — I was thinking as I walked back from the train station what to write here. How to make this a review that doesn’t end up just being about my own shibboleths? Namely, that all books about the Indian American Experience end up being exasperating because they’re always about alienation and/or dissatisfaction and/or HOW TO BE BICULTURAL in a way that seems designed to pander to (white) audiences?
Surprise I don’t know, so typical review it is! I’ll try to contextualize this one by talking about Desai herself. The daughter of a successful Indian-American-German author and professor at MIT, Desai grew up in India (Punjab, Mumbai, Delhi) before moving to the UK for a teenage year and then the US, where she studied at any number of well-thought-of universities for literary endeavors. In some sense, she is a nepobaby author, for all that her work has been raved about from day 1 and she’s also a Booker Prize winning novelist.
What I do think is that it makes her profoundly unsuited to writing a novel about disaffected, alienated immigrants to the States! What she does seem to know about is being lonely and not finding community, but in a way that suggests she’s struggled to find a place given what I can only assume is an immense amount of privilege–bicultural by way of money and international glamor. My mother came to Jersey City in the late 1980s, college educated and married but very alone. She made friends! Speaking English natively is a key differentiator for the educated Indian diaspora, which basically guarantees the ability to assimilate to one’s choice of level into native-English-speaking-countries. You can be the type of South Asian with only SA friends or make friends with other people and all of those friends will tell you that your boyfriend is a weird abusive creep who is not good for you.
I don’t know, it’s just hard to take either of these two seriously because they’re designed to be such in a vacuum as to be unbelievable. Maybe if there were reasons for their isolation? But we get no sense that they’re unlikeable or socially ill-adjusted, just that it’s the norm for them to be lonely and then swept up into this relationship that isolates them further (this part at least makes sense, abusive relationships no joke). It also makes Sonia perpetually at a loss compared to Sunny, which doesn’t help the dynamic between the two.
All said and done, I can’t really get much deeper into this work–well written, if a bit ‘author-y’ as one can expect from BOOKER BOOKS–because the fundamental premise is sort of tired and I’m just tired of them. When will someone write a truer to life work of the South Asian experience?
