Well-crafted auntie lit

I’ve read several brilliant books in which I couldn’t point to a single memorable passage. Their excellence lies in the gentle accretion of detail, like overnight snowfall; they say things sideways rather than in a blaze of textual craftsmanship.

The funny, beautifully-written Atlas of Unknowns (plot summary) is the inverse of this. Debut novelist Tania James, 28, fills the book with beautiful, memorable passages and piquant wit. But the book suffers from a poverty of ambition. Unwilling to actually become a pirate or a commando or commit murder or go to war, I read to stretch my mind and profit by the experiences of others. This novel doesn’t offer that. Mired in a very middle-class sensibility, Atlas is gorgeous but trivial and bounded, content in a sandbox of its own making.

The central conflict, two separated sisters reuniting, is done with less pathos than any middling Bollyflick. The plot thrives in Kerala, where characters face actual privation and penury, and droops in NYC. The sister who walks out faces nothing more dangerous than a subway ride in mundane areas of Manhattan and Queens. A lesbian subplot meant to drive much of the drama is hinted at in the softest of terms before the author turns away. The character remains a bit of a cipher, and it comes across as unwillingness to go there rather than elegant restraint. The book is terminally G-rated, well-crafted auntie lit which never lets its freak flag fly. The author either hasn’t truly lived or is unwilling to share it.

It’s one thing for a novel like No Onions Nor Garlic to stick to light comedy. But James has greater ambitions. She writes in a literary style, and in the U.S. at least, Atlas isn’t saddled with the dreaded sari cover. It feels like the author is content to bite off something rather less than she’s capable of. Tony D’Souza’s Whiteman, in contrast, is written in fairly spare language. But he joined the Peace Corps, traveled through West Africa and wrote an Ivory Coast novel of considerable emotional heft.

This has less to do with the subject matter, the emotions of intimates, and more with the author’s predilections. Mavis Gallant’s stories also focus on relationships between mothers and sisters. But, like The Remains of the Day, they pack a hidden punch, focusing on trivialities on the surface, plumbing deep drama beneath.

Though fundamentally unambitious, Atlas is great fun to read. James skewers American foreign policy, capricious visa denials, Orientalism, Malayali hypocrisy, the upper class in Kerala, and especially documentary filmmakers. Boy, does she have it in for NYC documentary-wale (her undergrad degree was in film). She shouts out to the locals: an auntie with a Namaste America-style talk show writes large checks to the IAAC, and much of the action is set in Jackson Heights.

I can do no greater favor to the book than to simply quote it at length: it’s well-written and howlingly funny. James smacks gadgetphiles:

Whenever he speaks of his film aesthetic, she feels comforted by his confidence, his panache… She also feels a vague pity… Piece by piece, e nestles the camera parts into the cushioned niches of the bag while she watches him in silence, thinking how safe and sad it is to put the bulk of one’s love in an inanimate thing.

On printing pr0n:

At the production house, Alice guides Linno around three chugging machines… ‘These are the Heidelbergs. Appa, Amma and Baby… [Papa]… can print fifteen hundred pages per minute. Multicolor offset, fully automatic, and includes foil stamping as well.’

Foreigners:

Foreigners are excellent for business, she says… strictly Raja Ravi Varma prints, those paintings with the plumpish, pleasant Malayali women playing veenas or holding ripe-bellied children to their hips. Around the clock, Ravi Shankar will whine softly from hidden speakers. The sign over the doorway will have to be fashioned anew, made to hearken after the royal mystique of Rajput kings… A sign… can net a whole school of foreigner. Alice pronounces the word ‘foreigner’ using the loving, hungry tones with which she talks of sweet kulfi…

Like most Keralites, [Linno] denounced the American president, American imperialism, and ate vanilla pistachio ice cream at the Ernakulam Baskin-Robbins all the same.

Snarking about Orientalism:

The King and I takes place in old Siam, in the court of a king payed by an American actor whose painted complexion is an odd golden brown, a color too metallic for any race; his eyes are also outlined to seem aslant. Similarly, the pretty white actresses are fashioned into mincing Siamese wives who approximate an accent bys peaking slowly and squeakily, whinnying behind tiny hands. And then there is the white woman teacher taking her long, confident strides within her bossy hoop skirts, her grammar as flawless as her coif, come to civilize the coif…

So Linno designs a scarlet and gold-leafed card that opens up from the bottom edge… a flat-roofed pagoda lifts from the back page… The party details are printed… in a… font called Chopsticks….

‘You’ve captured the essence of Asian flair…. How did you do it?’

‘Research…’

The tenderness of fathers (here I picture Irrfan Khan telling Gogol how he got his name):

He remembers when Anju, then a little girl, asked him if he regretted having no sons. Anju’s classmate Naresh had informed her that daughters drain their Appa’s finances.

He paused to think… ‘I have excellent finances,’ he said. ‘Did I ever tell you about your mothers teak trees? Dozens of them. I could marry you off several times over.’

To which Anju said a small voice, ‘Oh.’

What he meant to say was this: he has never felt anything but the most engulfing love for each child, before the infant was declared boy or girl, before it was neither he nor she but ours, a love that turned nearly fierce at each baptism, especially at the moment when the priest took the baby and sat her vulnerable bum in a cold basin of water, chanting, oblivious to her torrential screams.

Do get this book, even if it underperforms by its own high standards.

Junot Diaz praises it extravagantly.

She reads at InK, Kentucky (thanks, Joolz):

Related posts: Mavis and Tania, Ghetto in your pocket