You all know that I read a lot more than I review here on the site, right? I read like some people drink--as a daily form of escapism. And while I may churn out some decent sentences, for me to sit down and write is kind of like treating guinea worm disease. Long slow torture of pulling something out of your body, involving frequent rests to get your head together and forget the pain, plus screaming. So a book really has to spark some feeling for me to bother. Otherwise, it just gets filed into a category called Things I Don't Care About. It's a vast category.
This is a book that sparks frustration for me, because it has a good idea but Daswani makes so many poor choices in the telling of her tale that the novel is just mediocre. I have to ask, did she not have an editor or friend read it before publishing and give her critical feedback? Because she cuts her own narrative off at the knees at so many points that she completely lessens the effect of the tale. And the writing and secondary characters clearly show she's got some ideas and skill, and with a little refining this could have been a very, very good novel.
Anju comes from a wealthy Bombay family in the jewelry business, and as befits her social station she's expected to marry a fellow Indian of a good family and have children. Nothing more, and nothing less. Anju has a different path in mind, and persuades her parents to allow her to work and continue her education, first in Bombay and later in the US. She's very picky about her potential husbands when she's younger, but at age 30 she finds that herself in an uncomfortable place. She'd like to get married, but she's considered too old and too independent, if not actually slutty, by most suitors. Anju is faced with questions and doubts--did she make the wrong choices? Has she let her family down? Will she ever meet a nice fellow and fall in love?
The problems I have with this story center on the character of Anju. Her story is told as a first person flashback, so it's essentially a data dump. Classically lazy tell, not show. Then there is the fact that we are supposed to believe that Anju is spirited and ambitious, but she's not shown to be such. She's drab. Her one bit of spark comes when she bribes a fortuneteller to lie to her mother and say that her horoscope does not show her marrying until at least her late 20's so that her parents will be persuaded to let her go to America. We're told she's successful at her job as a "fashion publicist" but there are no details about what she likes about it, or how she goes about her job, or what makes her good at it. She enjoys Western life, but there's no detail about how she struggles to maintain her Indian identity and values. I mean, she doesn't date and she's a virgin! She lives in a bubble in Bombay, and then secrets herself in a bubble in NY. The only difference is that she lives alone in a studio apartment. She's a static, dull character with no voice, and to have her narrate a novel that is supposed to deal with her life and personal struggles--it's just not worth reading.
Then there is a question of the website. At one point, when Anju ramps up her marriage hunt, she takes a last-minute flight to a dinner party where an eligable man who might be interested is supposed to be. She later finds out that there's a website devoted to her attempts to find a husband. But this is never followed up on. It is the equivalent of that old bit of advice credited to Chekhov, that if you put a gun in the first act, it had better go off by the third. How can you put such a detail, ripe with dramatic possibilities, in a story, and not follow up on it? Anju doesn't Google herself to find fellow members of the Indian diaspora making fun of her? Sheesh!
There were a lot of possibilities in this novel, but it's ultimately unsatisfying. I like exploring Indian culture through fiction, and this story conveys the culture well, but the central character drove me nuts.
