A mundane tragedy

It is a curious fact of literary history that the children of famous writers often struggle to escape the long shadow of their parentage. For every Martin Amis who created their own distinctive voice, there are a dozen lesser talents condemned to be measured against the achievements of their forebears. Kiran Desai, daughter of the celebrated novelist Anita Desai, has not only escaped this fate but, with her 2006 Booker winner The Inheritance of Loss (Grove Press, 2005), established herself as a formidable force in her own right. After a hiatus of almost two decades, she has returned with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, shortlisted for this year's Booker. It's a novel that once again demonstrates her formidable fecundity of creating worlds. It's a work of immense scope and ambition, a book that is concurrently a multi-layered cross-continental saga and an intimate portrait of two souls searching for connection in a world that seems designed to keep them apart.

In her first book Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Anchor, 1999), Kiran Desai wrote a comic fable of a man who escapes the world by climbing a tree. In The Inheritance of Loss, she chronicled the violent political convulsions that toss individuals about like so much flotsam. In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the escape is inward and the convulsions are psychological. The grand historical forces are still present—globalisation, migration, the legacies of colonialism—but they are refracted through the prism of individual consciousness, surfacing as depression, artistic megalomania, and a pervasive, free-floating anxiety.

Desai constructs her narrative on a vast canvas, weaving together a multitude of storylines that span continents and generations. The novel is polyphonic, shifting its perspective from Sonia Shah, a solitary literature student whose profound loneliness at a Vermont college makes her vulnerable to a toxic and predatory affair with a much older artist, Ilan de Toorjen Foss, to Sunny Bhatia, a young journalist in New York feeling like an "impostor, a spy, a liar, and a ghost" while navigating a fraught relationship with his American girlfriend, Ulla.

While their lives run on parallel tracks, their families' richly detailed worlds in Allahabad and Delhi are ironically linked by a failed marriage proposal orchestrated by their grandparents. A large cast of finely-drawn secondary characters drives the plot: Sonia's unlucky, unmarried aunt Mina Foi serves as a haunting portrait of a life unlived, while Sunny's sharp-tongued, widowed mother, Babita, schemes against her corrupt brothers-in-law, a family feud that culminates in their brutal murders and the disappearance of two young servant girls. Desai masterfully braids these disparate threads: Sonia's psychological torment and escape from abuse, and Sunny's confrontation with his family's murky legacy, showing how the echoes of personal history and the pressures of the present conspire to bring two profoundly lonely souls onto an eventual, fateful collision course.

The loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is, in fact, the loneliness of almost everyone in Desai's richly populated world. Sunny's mother, Babita, is a prime example. For all her sharp wit, she is marooned by widowhood, a feeling she captures perfectly: "How desolate it was to have to hoard one's thoughts and jokes for future company, how tedious to translate them into a letter. How sweet it was when one could undo the lethargy of time by chatting with someone about the little things…" 

Sonia's aunt Mina Foi is similarly haunted by a life of quiet desperation and missed opportunities. From the lonely grandeur of an artist's ego to the silent suffering of a dutiful daughter, Desai makes it clear that her protagonists are not unique, but merely the focal point of a universally felt affliction: the one culture that is truly global, a lingua franca of despair spoken with equal fluency in Allahabad, New York, Delhi, and Vermont. It is a novel that asks what happens when the children of midnight's children find themselves utterly, terribly, magnificently alone at noon.

Throughout the novel, characters embark on desperate quests for a place of belonging, yet their actions merely deepen their alienation. This is a world where the concept of 'home' is a mirage. Sunny, seeking an authentic connection, moves to the immigrant enclave of Jackson Heights, only to observe his fellow Indians consciously ignoring one another, "as if it was better to be one Indian than two Indians." He seeks community but finds only a collection of solitary individuals performing the same lonely pantomime of escape. His mother, Babita, executes a grander version of this flight, purchasing the historic Casa das Conchas in Goa to escape the 'hell on earth' of her Delhi family feud. Yet, this idyllic mansion becomes a new prison of fear and isolation, besieged by property disputes, threatening phone calls, and the ghosts of the past, proving that a change of scenery is no cure for a haunted soul. Desai masterfully shows that in our globalized world, home is not a place one can return to or purchase, but a state of being that remains maddeningly out of reach.

Desai, after taking the reader on a tour of the ninth circle of modern loneliness, seems to offer a last-minute reprieve. Sonia and Sunny, two damaged souls, in the end, find solace in each other's company. It is a conclusion that is deeply humane, but one cannot help but wonder if it is also a little too convenient. After such an unflinching portrayal of the malady, the sudden appearance of a cure feels less like a comforting fiction, and more like a final, beautiful lie in a novel that has been so ruthlessly dedicated to the truth.

With what authority can we now speak of an Indo-Anglian tradition? If V.S. Naipaul was its perpetually wounded Jeremiah and Rushdie its garrulous, myth-making prophet, then Kiran Desai has become its foremost tragedian of the mundane. Desai sets aside the grand historical narrative not to diminish her canvas, but to magnify a more terrifying subject: the intimate cataclysm of the individual soul when human connection fails, leaving her characters adrift in the wreckage of their own lives. This is a novel that asks a question of profound and terrible simplicity: what becomes of the soul when it is set adrift from its cultural moorings, finding in the vaunted freedom of the West not liberation, but an abyss of self-consciousness? Desai's genius, and her claim to permanence, lies in her unflinching gaze into that abyss.

Najmus Sakib studies Linguistics at the University of Dhaka. Reach him at kazis713@gmail.com.