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Literary Review
VIEWPOINT
Time for a reality check
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PADMINI MONGIA demands that there be some relationship between a book, the advance on it, a generous review or the praise song on the jacket.
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I MADE the mistake again. I boarded a mode of transport — to which I was committed for several hours — with only one novel for company. I thought I had selected the novel well. I had anticipated reading it for months and imagined a story to savour within its well-bound pages. I was sure time would pass swiftly and pleasantly in the company of Pico Iyer's Abandon. I had bought the novel earlier in the year at its book launch in New Delhi. Part of the events celebrating 15 years of publishing by Penguin-India (arguably the single most important force in the tremendous "boom" of fiction by Indians that's currently deluging the world), Iyer's book launch was an elegant affair at the exquisite Taj Hotel where beers and snacks were passed around with insistent generosity as photographers clicked the men and women floating around chatting with each other.
Iyer spoke well. He spoke passionately of his novel. It began with a simple premise, he said. Here we were, in a post-9/11 world, where the divisive forces of Islam and Christianity were never more visibly at odds with each other, and yet in which Rumi was the best-selling poet in contemporary United States. Instead of all the reasons for separation between "us" and "them" that peppered current discourse, Iyer wanted to explore the tremendous forces of attraction and desire that lay on the other side of the relationship between the "West" and the "East". Desire. The desire for the other, for the markedly different "other", the desire for union, the desire for abandonment, such was Iyer's terrain in Abandon. Of course the West's desire for the East is by no means a new topic. Variants of it have served the imaginative minds of artists, writers, and scholars for several generations and hundreds of years. Yet, I did think that a novel exploring the desire for the abandonment of the self (as within the Sufi tradition), a novel exploring loss rather than gain as the primary means of knowing oneself could yield interesting insights, especially when set in a contemporary California layered with generous swathes of Iran, Iraq and Syria. So I bought the hard cover and picked up the novel to accompany me on a journey some months later.
For many of us who have followed the fortunes of Indian writing in English, who have grown up with the growth of the new Indian novel in English, the last 20 years have held unexpected reading delights at many turns. The excitement with which one has anticipated and devoured many novels — Midnight's Children, The Shadow Lines, English, August, Listening Now, The God of Small Things — has been one of the great joys of these last two decades. Yet, in recent years, there have also been many disappointments. Certainly there were disappointments earlier as well. But something new is now afoot. In the flourishing domain of Indian writing in English, a domain well served by media attention and financial success from all quarters of the globe, reader's expectations are built up to such an extent that the disappointment — when it comes — is more acute. It will not do to blame the media and its many machines which demand being fed. Might we also not ask of our publishers, our reviewers, and our critics that some finer distinctions be made so that there would be less of a gap between the hype and the text for which we're made to long?
Consider the following lines from Abandon: "She turned her head a little and kissed him now, deeply, imploringly, as if to try to summon up someone in hiding. Her hair fell around their cheeks, their mouths, and they were tented in its golden fall." Can this, I wonder, be the "knockout prose" Annie Dilliard had in mind when she wrote the blurb on the book jacket? Surely not. How many Introduction to Creative Writing classes would allow these lines to pass without the instructor's hand inevitably moving to the margin to pen in "Clichéd. Try saying this in some less predictable manner." If lines like these were the only deadening moments in Iyer's novel, of course any reader would let them pass. No, you wouldn't be enthralled but neither would you linger on them. But an entire novel built on passionless characters whose less than gripping lives are rendered in banal prose? One yearns for the lively Iyer of Video Nights in Kathmandu. Where did he go? And why did nobody say anything about the separation between Iyer's name and a liveliness he's clearly left behind? Is anybody reading and reviewing books anymore or are critics and reviewers merely adding to the hype we're now accustomed to from the much-maligned media?
In the time that's passed since I first delved into Abandon, I look around for a novel to read. Then I dimly remember I am reading one already, I am well into one. Then I try, once again, to go back to Abandon. Only to find myself restless for a novel even as I read one. I am now making a list I call "Novels I've forgotten to finish." Iyer's is one of them. As is Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics and Raj Kamal Jha's The Blue Bedspread. All three novels, unfortunately, have been my companions on long journeys. I've longed for these novels, I've peeked into but withheld reading them so I could yield to their power for a clear stretch of several hours. But when I have finally opened their crisp covers, I've been numbed. The books have deadened me instead of gripping me in a page-turning momentum. Then I've wanted to force the plane to stop, to turn around, to go back to that bookstore, back to that book review, back to that hype, to that book launch, that tremendously large advance from publishers in London and New York, all that machinery that fed the attention the novel received and I've wanted — at least, at the very least — to demand my money back.
I realise that my taste is not everyone's taste, I realise that what appeals to me needn't be what appealed to the many reviewers, publishers, scholars, critics and others who have loved the novels and the writers I am referring to. Yet, I also know I am not the only one who feels as I do. I know too many writers, scholars, and critics who along with me puzzle over the hoopla and hype surrounding a novel and try to reconcile it with their own response to it. It will not do to say, "Oh well, of course you can't trust reviews or book jackets or the word of authors you respect." Childish as it may be, I will grind my heels in and say, "I must demand that there be some relationship between a book, an advance on it, a generous review, a praise song on the book jacket, and a book launch (invitations only)." Isn't it time that readers began making some demands? And if I can't, I must at least whine loudly as I mis-choose my novels for my next long journey.
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