THE NOVEL'S FIRST-PERSON narrator, Sneha (she has a last name, but I can't find it), was born in India but raised in the USA. Her parents have returned to India, but she stayed to complete a bachelor's degree and now has a promising career despite the sluggishness of the economy (circa 2012-13) in a new town (Milwaukee). She has bonded with a lively group of friends from college and some new ones, including the slightly older Marina, with whom she has commenced a promising love affair.
So far, so Jhumpa Lahiri...and indeed Sneha's undergraduate coursework included reading Interpreter of Maladies, Mathews cannily tipping us off that she knows her novel is part of an emerging body of fiction about the South Asian immigrant experience in the contemporary United States.
Things start to go wrong for Sneha. Her boss somehow never gets around to paying her. The property manager at her apartment house is a jangling barbed-wire ball of hostility. Marina has a drinking problem. Her parents back in India are trying to find a husband for her. Over a few months, the omni-competent, super-achieving Sneha becomes anxious and depressed, is living on ramen, and finds herself unable to reach out either to her friends or to her family.
Mathews makes Sneha's year-of-the-wheels-coming-off all too plausible. You can taste that ramen, smell those unwashed dishes in the sink. The inevitable collapse occurs--and, mercifully, friends and family pull through. The threat of a suit for wage theft gets her boss to pay up. Sneha gets a new job and a new place to live and works on a reconciliation with Marina. She comes out to her parents, and they come around. Whew.
The last of the novel's four sections is set about ten years later--that is, about when the book was published, 2023. Sneha is back in Milwaukee (she has moved to D.C.) for a wedding, and is looking back at the chaos of ten years before from an altogether more grounded perspective. Her maturity was hard-won, but she did achieve it. Not that her loife is perfect, but she has come through.
Quite a satisfying novel, really, and it's Mathews's first. She is worth keeping an eye on.
No comments:
Post a Comment