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On a trip to see his grandparents in the Indian city of Allahabad, journalist Sunny Bhatia flicks through the morning papers, and is immediately at sea: what can the convoluted sentences before him – “TTIM files complaint against MSL at JM Rastra. MP(LTTK) holds GL Mukti strike to blame for Vasudev debacle. BORS reverberates in KLM(U) case” – possibly mean? His bewilderment at an India he cannot decode is, equally problematically, mirrored by the incomprehension he experiences in New York, where he occupies a junior role at the Associated Press.
Fortunately, there are other more readily accessible stories: a woman sold at a cattle fair in Rajasthan, and a retired railway clerk in Mysore who has grown his fingernails so long that they reach across the room and oblige his family to attend to his every physical need. They do not mind, the clerk tells Sunny when he interviews him over the phone, because they understand his determination to do something that nobody else has done: “The point is not about having longer fingernails than anyone; what is important is that I am firing up the younger generation to be ambitious. If I can do it, I tell them, I who used to have no discipline, then you can also reach your dream of fame.”
The story is, Sunny realises, excellent copy, even if his piece enrages the long-nailed man, who deems him an outsider pretending to be an insider, and a cheating outsider at that. There’s an echo of Desai’s own experience of writing her debut novel, 1998’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which drew on the apparently true story of a man who lived up a tree for 15 years to escape an unhappy marriage, and which roused the ire of the Nepali community she depicted. The irresolvable tension of the insider/outsider’s life ran through her Booker prize-winning second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, and is reprised in each of the multiple storylines in this mammoth novel, which has also been longlisted for the Booker.
Critically, it is a novel about work as much as it is about the relationship between Sunny and Sonia Shah, whose families are neighbours and whose attempts to make a match begin their on-off liaison. Where Sunny dreams of journalistic success, albeit heavily inflected by the work of JD Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut, Sonia’s heart and mind lie in writing fiction. Alienated and alone at college in rural Vermont, she finds solace in Tolstoy, but is perplexed and provoked by the idea of magic realism and “the enticement of white people by route of peacocks, monsoons, exotic-spice bazaars”. The dilemma facing an Indian writer, she ponders, is one of obeisance to the west’s appetites and projections, and the lure of producing “stories cheapened by proliferation, decorative outside and hollow inside”.
Desai’s solution to the problem in this immensely entertaining and generative novel is to dart continually between modes of representation and register. The gothic novel appears with the early introduction of the monstrous Ilan de Toorjen Foss, a narcissistic artist who seduces Sonia, suppresses her literary endeavours and then abandons her (“don’t write orientalist nonsense! Don’t cheapen your country or people will think that this is actually India … What Westerners did to you, you are doing to yourself”). The predicaments and predilections of Sunny and Sonia’s Allahabad relatives create a low-key bourgeois comedy: stranded single aunts, genteel impoverishment, the wrangle over a cook famed for his kebabs. These are reprised in higher style by Sunny’s widowed mother, the impossibly grand Babita, who is embroiled in a noir crime plot by the machinations of her late husband’s brothers and whose preoccupation with wealth and status cast light on the rapidly evolving strata of contemporary urban India.
In the interstices of the discrete and distinctive tones of each of these narrative components, the novel allows itself to succumb to a wild and suggestive indeterminacy, conveyed through various iterations of Sunny and Sonia’s internal monologues, sometimes rational and ruminative, sometimes operatic and hallucinatory. Sonia “dreamt the walls leaked blood. She dreamt she ate a pie, and when she bit into it, the pie leaked blood. She dreamt she had a hideous baby and it died, and when she cut it open with scissors, it was not a baby at all – it had a child’s head but a lizard’s skeleton.” Such nightmarish visions are not confined to sleep, particularly when a marauding dog enters the story to pursue her.
Capacious and shape-shifting though the novel is, filled with subtexts and shadow narratives, it is still a challenge to hold the contradictions and demands of multiple identities. Desai pictures Sonia and her father listening to the Pakistani singer Iqbal Bano, and reflecting on what the music conjures in them: “To be a citizen of a troubled postcolonial nation gave a person gravitas. To be holding out against the crass new world gave a man gravitas. To be wounded yet fighting on against the barbarians gave one gravitas. To be exiled, abandoned by love and luck, gave them gravitas. What happened within a family, what happened between a couple, was no different from that which happened in a nation under dictatorship, running on fear.”
Whether or not a novel can accurately and productively capture this yearning for gravitas, or the continuum between the personal and the political, is one of the questions posed by The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Another is the sheer exhaustion – mental, physical and artistic – caused by the constant need for self-invention and reinvention, whether individual, societal, national or global; and how the form of the novel, created in the European consciousness, can complexify itself to take account of an accelerated, fractured modernity. Desai’s answer to these questions is to make her story both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature; to make us feel that there is as much at stake in the lives of Vini-Puri, a pair of servant girls in Babita’s household not even accorded single-name recognition, as in the grand ambitions of the novel’s title characters. She pulls it off, not only in her manoeuvring of cast and incident, but in her ability to elicit apprehension, laughter, compassion and curiosity in the reader.
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