What they call lit (updated)

(This is a quick impression, not a review.)

After reading the first half of What You Call Winter by Nalini Jones (thanks, SP), I wasn’t feeling this story collection about Catholics in the fictional Santa Clara burb of Bombay. It’s an even chillier version of Jhumpa Lahiri’s style, alienation lit. The familiar is made strange not by insight, engagement or lexical backflips but by replacing its marrow with cryogenic fluid. It’s a style much in vogue at many lit workshops, but in grinding off all the edges it tends to leave me cold.

A heavily stylized writing style deserves an equally hefty payoff. But Jones’ first story leans heavily on a rather obvious metaphor involving a snake, a garden, a long stick and a loss of innocence. The stories in the first half also make little reference to their rather vibrant location, and since the names are almost all Christian, they could be set virtually anywhere.

What you’re left with is reasonably polished lit in a well-accepted style which suffers from a paucity of engagement or surprise. The strongest point of emotional resonance gave birth to the title, which refers to the difference in seasons between America and Bombay. Jones was wise to choose it as the book’s namesake. Would that there were more such moments of recognition.

But if you dig the Lahiri, you might give this a look.

Update: Chandrahas digs the linked story form:

We are told in passing of a certain Toby Fernandez–a young man from the community–who had once proposed to her and been turned down, and is now engaged. Two stories later, as if moving from door to door down a street, we come across the same Toby Fernandez, nearly 50, but still a bachelor, remembering a woman he used to love in his youth…

These perfectly turned stories illumine in aching detail the life of a vanishing world… [Link]