Is Immigration Really So Lonely?

"Long novels demand respect. Entering a bookstore and picking up a 600-page literary novel, many readers will make an instinctive calculation: This must be serious. No author would spill so much ink without having something essential to say. A reader's expectations may rise further if the writer were, say, a hermetic celebrity who has not published a book for 19 years - and higher still if that famous novelist were writing about writing, staking her claim on the form of the novel itself."

"Booker longlisted already, it's the follow-up to Desai's 2006 Booker-winning superhit The Inheritance of Loss. And it is a big swing. Set primarily in India and the United States between 1996 and 2002, and told in an omniscient third person that nods to the 19th-century Russian novel, it combines various traditions of realism: It's part marriage plot, part trauma plot, and part novel of manners."

Set primarily in India and the United States between 1996 and 2002, the story follows Sunny, a reporter, and Sonia, an aspiring novelist. An omniscient third-person voice nods to 19th-century Russian realism and blends marriage plot, trauma plot, and novel-of-manners conventions. The arranged-marriage frame is complicated by cross-cultural relationships and a failed matchmaking, prompting the protagonists to come together on their own terms. Themes of loneliness, cosmopolitan isolation, Indian identity, and metacommentary on representing identity recur throughout. The narrative interrogates old-world/new-world dichotomies and the immigrant experience of solitude and belonging.

Read at Vulture