Mixed ‘Marriage’
Longtime readers will be familiar with my sentiments on sari covers and mangoxotic titles. I approached my friend V.V. ‘Sugi’ Ganeshananthan’s new novel Love Marriage with some trepidation. Fortunately, the innards belie the sari wrapper. This is not curry lit.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this book — my loyalties lie more with its smart, personable author. Love Marriage is only the second novel I’ve read about the Sri Lankan civil war, after Michael Ondaatje’s haunting, bleak Anil’s Ghost, and the first about Tamils in Toronto. The beginning is intuitive, flows well and has tremendous narrative pull. At first, the novel grabbed me as fully as did The Konkans. But as the novel wore on, it didn’t sustain its promising start.
The book is written through the eyes of Yalini, a girl in her early 20s whose parents Murali and Vani left Sri Lanka after anti-Tamil pogroms and built a comfortable life in America. Her mother hears from her long-disappeared brother Kumaran, a fearsome Tamil Tiger who’s dying of cancer and manages to get a compassion visa to die in Canada. When Yalini’s parents first met in New York, Kumaran had crashed through the door of Murali’s family in the desh, threatening mayhem if they went through with their scandalous love marriage. Murali the doctor defied him and wed his beloved Vani. Decades later, the doctor is merciful to his long-ago rival.
The novel’s style is earnest, fractured, a series of vignettes broken up by half-page passages which jump back and forth between characters. The author erects certain metaphors in Caps like The God of Small Things, which makes them inexplicably Twee. The same Affectation used to define Terms in legal Agreements somehow becomes adorable in Literature. But in this book, the metaphors recurse — the literal symbolizes things of the same form. To wit, instead of noses for dandas, hearts for Hearts. The book uses flesh-and-blood pumps to represent flawed emotional Hearts, and arranged or love marriages for proper or improper Marriages. And this strikes me as far too literal.
Similarly, a trope which could have been desi film homage actually reads more like cliché. One of the plot machinations which gets a woman into her marriage involves her identical twin sister suffering a horrible accident. But there’s no obvious wink to the reader.
The shorter passages are padded with half-pages of white space. That both puts the book at novel length and limits the passages to formula: setup, sentence fragments, dramatic single-sentence close, repeat. Identical lines are repeated thrice (’We remember him. We remember him. We remember him.’ and a similar repetition later in the novel), and they don’t make the leap from repetitiveness to dramatic tension.
A handful of longer passages are didactic philosophical arguments, telling-not-showing without linking directly into the plot. And some dialogue sound more like the author’s voice than the character’s, sophisticated and not quite believable. This is, of course, a common problem in lit fic, afflicting authors as otherwise skilled as Ondaatje.
Sugi shouts out to the Lankan peeps in terms deeper and more meaningful than M.I.A.’s pop confections. The Toronto community gets several nods. She takes care to say she disagrees with the Tamil Tigers’ tactics while understanding Tamil grievances; she points out that they kill Tamils they disagree with. But she soft-pedals the central problem with the LTTE, the reason why people call them terrorists: their willingness to target noncombatants, to kill people unaffiliated with the Sri Lankan military or high-ranking politicians.
The generally intuitive writing style, the warmth and gristle of the characters, the portraits of Sri Lankan village life, the dearth of lit fic on the civil war all make Love Marriage an engrossing read. The novel is written in a somber, fluid voice with great potential. But where the book violates lit fic conventions, it does so not to stretch the rules but to play it safe. And so I’m more looking forward to the next one:
Ganeshananthan, a former [Harvard] Crimson managing editor, reached a two-book deal with Random House, Inc., late last month. [Link]
In kindergarten in Bethesda, MD… she hit it off with a classmate, Rebecca Shapiro. The two were side by side all the way up through high school; then Ms. Shapiro headed to Brown and Ms. Ganeshananthan entered Harvard. Following a senior thesis (the skeleton of Love Marriage) supervised by Jamaica Kincaid, a post-collegiate year on staff at The Atlantic Monthly and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Ms. Ganeshananthan–who goes by three first names: the one on her birth certificate; a shortened form thereof used by close friends; and her pen name, the letters V.V.–got herself an agent to shop around her manuscript. By then, Ms. Shapiro had become an editor at Random House. “I’m her first acquisition ever,” Ms. Ganeshananthan said proudly. [Link]
The New York Observer was happier with the novel:
The fragmented narrative that follows is the most innovative thing about the book–and the weakest, because it dissipates some of the emotional impact and also encourages a paradoxically showy kind of clipped prose. (Colons: lots of them.) In the end, though, this is an ambitious family drama about an underreported part of the world, filled with well-shaded characters–which, combined with the occasional gorgeous flourish (a sky “turning from black to dark blue and beginning to forget the stars”) more than compensates for some freshman overreach. [Link]
In many ways, Love Marriage is a hometown NYC production. Preston Merchant took the author photo. Journalism prof Sree Sreenivasan of SAJA is thanked in the acknowledgments. And Suketu Mehta (Maximum City) did the author interview in the back of the book in one of those ‘plus’ sections which publishers seem determined to push upon our paperbacks.
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