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| Good taste becomes him |
Yale has an entire course this semester dedicated to South Asian lit. And we didn’t even have to donate a million bucks for a South Asia chair destined for a non-South Asian 
Not even As-Am torchbearer Berkeley had one of these back in the day:
FALL 2005: ENGL 347a, CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION
William Deresiewicz…Contemporary fiction by writers of South Asian birth or descent… Authors include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidwa, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Average reading load: 250 pages/week. [Link]
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p>Sure, it’s 250 pages/week — if you leave out A Suitable Boy Why is the prof fascinated with these themes?
William Deresiewicz is the author of Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets… [Link]
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| The redcoats are coming |
Ah yes, soap operas with Victorian morés, a perfect match. It’s that blasted Pride and Prejudice again. After jonesing for Bridget (twice) and Bride of Gurinderstein, the new Keira Knightley version seems superfluous. The horse has not only been beaten, it’s died and been reincarnated as a hack. Ennis has been pitching me the book, but I’m in sucrose overdose.
Deresiewicz talks smack about Jhumpa Lahiri’s work:
Interpreter of Maladies… exhibit[s] a high degree of competence, but it’s the kind of competence that makes you want to call for the abolition of writing programsIt’s the kind of competence that makes you want to abolish writing programs… The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted–no, machine-tooled–to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices–the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany–arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock. Lahiri has since published The Namesake, a dull, studied, pallid novel that says remarkably little about the immigrant experience while elaborately fetishizing the consumption patterns of the liberal upper-middle class. [Link]
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p>About Zadie Smith’s latest:
… [Smith’s] ascent was part of the late-’90s fad for beautiful young women novelists with Commonwealth roots (itself a subset of the post-cold war globalization frenzy). Smith made a third with Arundhati Roy, whose God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997, and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999, won the Pulitzer Prize the following year…The narrative voice is… flatter, less exuberant and inventive. And while On Beauty is as long as White Teeth, it has neither the earlier novel’s scope nor its ambition. [Link]
All of this is so obviously a Rushdie ripoff, it’s excruciatingAnd about Smith’s first novel, White Teeth:
The postcolonial thematics–history, memory, identity, hybridity–which could have seemed fresh only to someone who’d been living in a cave for twenty years, are served up with the baldness of an undergraduate essay. And all of this, along with the novel’s postmodern coin tricks, is so obviously a Rushdie rip-off it’s excruciating. But White Teeth exhibits two great strengths, neither of them the kind one expects from so young a writer: the acuteness of its social satire and the brilliance with which it inhabits perspectives utterly different from its author’s. Smith gives us aging Indian waiters, bookish teenagers, high-handed liberal moms… [Link]
While I don’t entirely agree with W.D.’s 40s, his course does take the school back to its origins as the spawn of Madras governor Elihu Yale and the British East India Company.
Thank you Professor !! finally
So much to say; so little time.
What’s the point of this post? That a non-South Asian can’t teach a class about SA lit? I am not trying to be snarky, just genuinely curious.
Many academics have made the connection between the Victorian novel and the post-colonial novel (for lack of better terms. I can write lots about the term “post-colonial”).
I agree with his assessment of Lahiri although not Smith. I really enjoyed her newest, ON BEAUTY. Highly recommended.
And yes, I will be going to check out Knightly’s version of Eliza Bennet. It is beating a dead horse, I agree, but I want to see how they’ve ‘sexed it up’ as I’ve read elsewhere. (Disclaimer: It is one of my favorite books.)
Manish, don’t let all the film adaptations scare you off the original P&P novel, which has more dimension.
Notice the 😉
I liked White Teeth better than On Beauty, but they’re both a sight better than Autograph Bunda.
For his words on Lahiri alone, I think I love this guy.
Also, I think Manish won a special place in my heart with his caption of Keira Knightley. OTOH, with a last name like Knightley, it was just a matter of time before she got herself tangled up with some Austen.
I am bad with emoticons :).
I also liked WHITE TEETH better than ON BEAUTY, but the latter was quite good. Her characters are quite memorable.
I agree, Deepa. Most people who knock Austen dismiss her as chick-lit (my pet peeve). The novel is dense, witty, and laugh-out-loud funny. (And I am a sucker for good humor.)
“elaborately fetishizing the consumption patterns of the liberal upper-middle class”
Finally. I am too lazy to dig up all of the evidence.
And I know where someone went to school doesn’t strictly fall under “consumption” — but — almost all of her characters seem to come from elite schools. There is a character in her short story collection, that is a Stanford grad, Ashoke in The Namesake goes to MIT, Gogol to Yale & Columbia, Moushumi went to Brown. I mean all this in one novel.
Am I reading too much into this? Is there any character in any of her work that is from a non-Ivy background?
Is there any major character of hers who is non-Bengali?
neither MIT nor Stanford are in the Ivy League… but i think you just mean elite schools….
anyway, i think it’s great this class is being offered. when i was at stanford i took a class on “south asian diaspora” and it was phenomenal. prof. bakirathi mani taught it as a part of the cultural and social anthropology coursework (i believe she’s now at swarthmore in their american literature department). there was also other south asian themed classes there, but i don’t recall any focused purely on fiction.
the class reading list will be going into my amazon wishlist shortly…
Profe, I would argue that it is the consumption patterns that actually say quite a lot about the liberal upper-middle class immigrant experience, and even those in other levels.
manish must have been too busy mackin’ on sproul plaza to take the south asian lit class taught by aditya behl.
Absolutgcs,
Yeah, I meant elite schools. Initially I typed HYPSM, and then thought the term would be too obscure.
By the way, while, I was attending the Harvard of the Midwest (but without none of that boring academic crap) they did have a course called Third World Literature. An odd name, come to think of it, shouldnÂ’t it have been called Post-colonial literature or something like that.
Anar,
I think Jhumpa Lahiri is aware that her characters inhabit a very “bengali-world”. When Gogol, goes to kindergarten for the first time, the teacher asks the father, if they know the “modis’ or the “saxenas”, he says no.
which Harvard of the Midwest is this? 🙂
For his words on Lahiri alone, I think I love this guy.
I second that.
Deepa,
Which one?? There is only one Harvard of the Midwest. Perhaps you are confusing my school with assorted Dartmouths and Colgates of the Midwest.
I donÂ’t want to name-drop, let me just say they have a great basketball program. And itÂ’s the place where only 25,000 of the finest minds, in the Midwest, can come together to learn all manner of drinking games. TheyÂ’ve even decided to build a library this year! So if any of you would like to donate any books from like the Time-Life series, that would be like really cool.
Manish,
DoesnÂ’t Amardeep that Friend-Of-Sepia also teach South Asian Lit. I would be interested to know more about his reading list too.
ironically, probably half of the mutiny could audit this class, having already devoured the assigned reading, for sheer fun.
No comments on Lahiri. I’m trying to behave this week, for Diwali 😉
Deepa, I guess then your’s must be the Yale of the Midwest.
The Namesake is really good and i thought it was a very good portrayal of a desi man’s life, albeit not in its entirety
in actuality i love desi writing. salman rushdie is pretty good
but my greatest love is william faulkner, followed by marquez. to me, faulkner evokes a “place”. and being thats its “southern”, to me that actually speaks to me as a punjabi because i really like novels set in a particular place. faulkner is just the south in all its (decript) glory. combine that with the fact faulkner is all about melancholy and partly about a world that is no more, it really has a connection to someone in a diaspora. sometimes its better to read a writer who isn’t talking from a similiar experience as you as a reader, but who is talking about a world that the reader can relate to. to me the south that faulkner writes about is like that. similiar to lucinda williams’ song-writing. its totally about the Deep South, mostly Liousiana, and its totally music to my ears. as funny as it might sound, those two people are two of the artists people as a punjabi-desi/american i feel really at home with
there’s like two harvard of the midwest’s, both in chicago, and neither one of them really talk to each other being as they’re on opposite ends of town
northwestern degress make you a lot of money
university of chicago degrees just make you (think you’re) smarter than anyone else you ever meet
TEF,
Thanks for thinking of me… My reading list, I believe, is a little more adventurous: Tagore, Sukumar Ray, Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee, Agha Shahid Ali, Nirmal Verma, and lately, G.V. Desani.
I also have to say that I disagree with him (and most of you, I gather), on Jhumpa Lahiri. The Namesake may be a pallid, studied little novel, but it just about captures the upper-middle class ABCD experience that I knew. (Perhaps because: being an upper middle class ABCD is a pallid little life? Oh well)
The weird thing is that he’s still teaching Lahiri. If he doesn’t like her, why bother? I try and make it a point never to teach books I don’t like.
I dare not go up against the Professor, 🙂 but, I just want to point out that I agree that the book captures the upper-middle class ABCD experience fairly well. It just says very little about it, which is my peeve with it, I guess.
No disrespect intended, of course, Amardeep.
Amardeep, maybe he teaches it because it’s “important”? I’ve had a lot of profs who chose texts because of their influence, popularity, importance, rather then if they like it or not. (I don’t teach texts I didn’t love, either.)
If he doesn’t like her, why bother?
Maybe to have some 2nd gen representation on the reading list?
I personally think it’s a little odd to have a class on South Asian fiction in the first place (one that’s apparently based purely on race, divorced from geography or nationality of any sort, whether Indian or Trinidadian or Canadian or American). I can sort of see how Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri can be studied together but I really don’t understand why.
Admin- Can you pls delete my comment above? I solved my own conundrum. Thx
Rani said:
I am on my way through the ‘Boy’.
Anyway Sir/Ma’am, since you apparently enjoyed the book, I can
Varun
I loved the book despite never haven’t been in India or experiencing
the things you have, though the novel takes place during a well-known and documented period in Indian history. To me, a western woman, the book was wonderful. One doesn’t spend all one’s leisure time with a 1349-page book if it’s not a rewarding experience (unless one only wants to develop muscles from hefting it up and down!). Seth has a way of giving his characters life — even the women, which is difficult for many male writers. (I wish that he’d appended a glossary, however; it sometimes was difficult to deduce the meaning of a word through contextual clues alone. But, I even found an Indian restaurant in Santa Monica [Nawab] that has “nimbu pani” on the menu.)
There is a universality to the work of every great writer. One can no more say that Shakespeare is too localized “to be appreciated by a majority of the readers” than one can say it about Isabel Allende or Horace.
It would be a great disservice to appreciative readers to deny them the opportunity (or right) to voice their opinions simply because they did not live in a particular part of India at the time in question.
You say: “my point is that the novel was written by Seth for Seth. What is really so delectable is that he doesn’t even care if the reader is getting what is being described. Of course, for me the plot has ceased to matter…” Precisely! One of the reasons that “A Suitable Boy” has universal appeal is because Vikram Seth has written vividly about people and places he cares about and and ideas that interest and concern him.
These people and places and ideas come alive in his book; they reach out and touch the reader in places of the heart.
— Varda
isn’t it Lahiri’s style to be spare with her words?
i have to agree, austen’s novels, particularly pride and prejudice, are witty and for the most part, light easy reading.
that said, they also offer the most scathing criticisms of societial customs and in particular, marriage and gender roles. almost every marriage portrayed in pride and prejudice is in some way or the other a mockery of the institution.
don’t dismiss her books manish! if you want something that’s not so “chick-litish” i’d recommend mansfield park.
nice pic of keira.
Wikipedia has an article on the subject, they list close to 50 schools that call themselves the Harvard of the Midwest.
My thinking is that if you have to compare yourself to somebody you’ve lost the battle already. Yale doesn’t call itself the Harvard of New Haven, it just is Yale. MIT doesn’t call itself Harvard’s engineering department, it’s just MIT. Caltech doesn’t call itself the MIT of California, it’s just Caltech. etc.
what about wash u? that’s what i thought of when i heard “harvard of the midwest”… hmm, weird.
The first person who mentioned “Harvard of the Midwest” was referring to University of Michigan, see the number of students described. It’s been using that sobriquet for some time, although I believe that it used to call itself the Harvard of the West, back when Michigan was on the Western side of the US …
Harvard of the Midwest = West Coast Ivy = Chicken of the Sea.
“V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidwa, and Jhumpa Lahiri”
At the risk of sounding like a troll..aren’t all those authors (with one notable exception) all Indian?
Why “South Asian?”
There exists a perfectly legitimate term for fiction falling in this genre – “Indo-Anglian” fiction. The term may not have been perfect but it sure is more precise than “South Asian”
Just my 2 paise
Heh, Manish, how did I not know that one? 🙂
Re: Lahiri—Amardeep, if I was in your class I would eagerly take you on, but in comments I find it a bit difficult, because I cannot use my face and tone to communicate to you how much I respect and regard your opinion. So you must promise to remember that I really do respect you a lot, in case I become too vehement. 🙂
I think Lahiri is a very, very talented writer who has a lot of craft. And that’s admirable. But it can also be a severe let down. I am irritated by too much craft in the service of too little story.
So, I’m sure she knew some of her most critical readers–perhaps the bulk of the critical hump in the reader-histogram–would be second generation readers with sharp eyes and ears for the descriptions she’s famous for lavishing. My Alaskan-White-Boy friend’s mom (more on that later) is only going to drink the detail in, and happily absorb it, not judge it for accuracy. When you’re describing a wholely new and interesting world, and people are convinced your subject is important, you can get away with a lot of description and not having much plot or anything to say. When you’re covering territory that’s familiar to your readers, they can have three possible reactions–they can either be irritated with your inaccuracies, charmed at your inaccuracy (and narcissistically pleased at seeing their world in print), or bored by something familiar and waiting for what you have to say, what your new contribution is.
Well, she’s accurate when it comes to a certain slice of Bengali-American life, so she doesn’t have to worry about cateogory 1. And I find that many desi readers fall into either categories two or three. I’ll be honest—the last time I was with a bunch of Bengalis, I was the only Bong in the room who wasn’t a fan. I would easily characterize the praise as falling into category two. Many readers are diasporic narcissists, borrow a well-turned from Manish, our king of Diasporic Narcissism. Clearly there’s a place for that. People want to read books that reflect their experience and invoke their microcultures, and a lack of such cultural reflections is one of the chief laments of this blog. That, however, is not really what I get out of literature or at least most of it.
Familiar or strange, to me the details are only worth celebrating if they serve some story that transcends its context. My favorite literature classes picked out the themes and opinions of seemingly unrelated stories and connected them through sheer humanity. Take, for example, one of my favorite pieces of ethnography. Admittedly written in an easier style, The Chosen describes in minute (and apparently accurate) detail a world and culture and gender that is completely different from mine. Unrelated cultures. Yet when I read it I related to it deeply and it has served as a touchstone for many issues and intellectual themes in my life since. Friendship, scholarship, relations with one’s parents, the evolution of eager ambition into careful work–these are universal subjects, and The Chosen has something to say about them in a universal manner. Other examples–To Kill a Mockingbird. Love Medicine. I long for that kind of desi-American literature. Dare I say, were I to write a novel, I’d aspire for it reach that level of epiphany and drama. I’d be willing to sacrifice perfection of presentation in spots, be willing to fudge a few material details or work with a less representative sample, as long as I touched some real nerve of the human condition. Such novels are not pretty-picture windows to marvel at, they are doors to walk through.
So no category two for me. I’m just not sentimental or nostalgic enough to get a kick out of seeing some piece of my childhood represented in print. I need plot, drama, realization. And I feel Lahiri knew that there would be a wide swathe of readers in this third category, not satisifed by ethnography or invocation. Seeing as she had no truly profound insight into the inner life of her characters, no interior crescendo to build upto, she threw in a single shocking incident of plot to stir things up and make the story be important to people in category #3.
So I read most of the book on the plane, and there I was, agreeing with brimful, and being rather bored with this pallid little book about our pallid little Bengali ways. And then IT HAPPENED. I’m not going to give it away, but if you’ve read the book, you know what IT was. Here’s a clue–I was deeply embarrasssed to be whimpering like a baby on the plane, and I made a very particular cell phone call the INSTANT I got off the plane. I was also really annoyed. Because I have to think that consciously or subconsciously Lahiri picked one of the few things to happen that she knew would tug at the heart strings of even the most bored and dismissive critical desi reader, especially a seond generation 20 or 30-something. For most of us it’s luckily still just a nightmare, and for some of us it’s a painful reality, and for almost all of us it’s one of the few topics we can’t be jaded or cynical about. And–except for the last page, and then too little and too late–I feel like Lahiri did not honor this profound clawing of the heart she subjected her readers to. It was an event, it happened, and the hero changed in a very external and unexamined way. There was much more oomph and potentially exciting things to say in the incident spawning the second major storm of his life, but she only brushed against it briefly, as if afraid of the first real drama she had truly imagined. (A whole novel from Moushumi’s pov–now that, that I might have liked.)
Then there is category #4–people who aren’t desi at all, people for whom this is all very new and strange and interesting. People like my friend’s mom, who collared me at his graduation and said I must read the namesake, it perfectly describes the immigrant experience. I am annoyed that all these people now think they understand me. As it happens I know Lahiri’s slice of life is accurate, because I have been in that slice of life, but I have mostly not been in it, and my bit of Bengali-Americana is very different in very important ways. That’s not Lahiri’s fault, though, that’s the fault of the kind of critics (and professors! and readers!) who want just one book they can cite/teach/experience a whole ream of experience out of. Beyond that, though, it’s valulable ethnography. I’ve read some nicely written but ultimately bland Asian-American literature which I like to read once in a while because it depicts a time and place that I’m casually interested in. But it’s just not that great. I would expect my analysis to be identical to that of a Japanese American reading those works. In the end, I feel ethnography alone is not great literature.
And I just don’t think upper-middle-class desi life is all that pallid, necessarily. 😉 Troll these comments, and I think you’ll find lots of evidence for exciting lives. Moreover, Tagore was the king of showing that the most quiet, uneventful life can be rife with drama.
Of course, I should stop complaining and keep writing. 😉
Saheli, excellent thoughtful post. As usual.
Yes, yes, of course.
Which makes me think of another question for all you readers out there. My favorite ‘genre’ of books is social satire, i.e. Austen, Wharton, Swift. Any comtemporary (past 10 yrs) that fit this title? South Asian or not?
Saheli,
If you were in my class, you would get an ‘A’ for that comprehensive, well-supported comment. 😉
Seriously, have you thought about turning your thoughts into some kind of essay?
I’m on a shaky internet connection (neighbor’s wireless), so I can’t respond at length, except to say that your (intense) response is a sign of the novel’s success, at least on the level of engaging us over-educated American sortadesis. Maybe it’s still not fun to read the way some other writers are.
In lieu of a proper response (maybe later today), I’ll point you to some further thoughts I posted on the Namesake here. Coincidentally, that post I’m was the first time I was linked to by Manish; it might have been the first week Sepia Mutiny was live. (And I don’t think I’ve mentioned Gayatri Spivak on my blog since!)
i liked the way Lahiri just let that happen to characters. to explain the outcomes or to give too much detail into motivations would be very different
the reason i like the way Lahiri did it is she sets out a story of a second gen desis, and leaves it to us. the thing that struck me from the book is that this thing just happened to Gogol and Moushmumi which wasn’t totally unreasonable as an outcome, and that was it. bang….you’re life just changed and there’s no one who really understands, not even the author.
that’s in a way what might happen if you go through life like Gogol as a second gen desi who is making life choices his parents aren’t always able to get, and its just you to pick up the pieces however you’re able
I’d have to agree with several people here re: Jhumpa Lahiri — I thought the “Interpreter” collection was average with occasional flashes of brilliance — but I wasn’t sufficiently impressed by it to read “Namesake”. I was kind of turned off by the fetishizing that the Yale prof mentions — do we really need to know, or care, that someone’s 1970s tape deck was a Grundig model #xyz?
She reminds me of a more refined and controlled version of early Bharati Mukherjee (from the “Wife” and “Darkness” era) but like Bharati, JL ultimately doesn’t deliver any profound observations.
Give me an Upamanyu Chatterjee or Romesh Gunesekera — two under-appreciated writers whose early works really moved me — “English, August” and “Monkfish Moon” are classics. Adding RG to the canon would also broaden the ‘South Asian lit’ term to include Sri Lanka.
A lot of the Lahiri backlash can be distilled to good old-fashioned academic envy. To frustrated academics, she’s an easy target as she has successfully hurdled the trenches of pedantry and gone over to the other side (predictably, being commercially successful doesn’t help).
Speaking of pedantic, I did have the vague feeling that I was in a creative writing workshop when reading “Interpreter”. But I think that had to do mostly with reading on the book jacket that she had a Phd. It provokes the inevitable, “what kind of an artist needs a Phd?” gut reaction/
Wow, I’m so pleased and relieved to find
Fans will call it a “backlash”, but in actual fact, it’s simply criticism, from which no writer’s immune.
Deresiewicz’s wrote: “The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted—no, machine-tooled—to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives.”
That is so accurate that I want to cry with pleasure.
Lahiri, ridiculously over-praised, is competent, and competence is not what I go to literature for. I want my world rocked. Then again, most recent Pulitzer Prize winners have been over-praised. I don’t know what the goddamn MFA is doing to the dangerous profession of prose storytelling.
As someone else remarked, many of these books are starting to read like creative writing workshops. BORING.
Put down the machine-tools people. Live. Live fully. And only then, only then, write.
Saheli, yes! And George Michael Ondaatje – I love that comment. I love, love, love that comment.
Desis are more generous with Lahiri because of her novelty in representing the 2nd gen experience in fiction. I’ve found little defense of her actual mastery of the novel form even among her fans – most of my friends just couldn’t get past how familiar the characters were in Namesake. Much like people are even willing to tolerate those god-awful american-desi-chai movies (‘course Lahiri is a far better artist). It’s nice that new desi writers can count on support from the community though such support appears to be extended to artists only when their art is about the community (Saheli mentioned narcissism in her great post)…I doubt we’d discuss Lahiri as much if she’d written just a “regular” novel.
[bows to Saheli]
YES!
Thanks MD.
Speaking of literature that rocks one’s world, I see that Timepass has evoked the hallowed name of Upamanyu Chatterjee.
“English, August,” was a book of unbelievable confidence and hilarity. It’s a sign of the tight manipulations afoot in the world of international Anglo-Indian publishing that Chatterjee is unknown to American readers.
I think it brings up the larger problem of prize-giving, and the way that prizes, especially in the last half-century, influence canon formation.
All said and done, Jhumpa’s doing the best she can, and the fault lies with those who praise her beyond her abilities. Would she be the subject of debate if she’d written a book like Seth’s “An Equal Music” which focuses only on non-Indian characters? Or, to put the shoe on the other foot, can you imagine how much critical hullaballoo would have been surrounded an equal music if it had been about a Delhi sitarist and his thwarted love for a tabla player?
As it is, the milieu helped uncloud our eyes, and most people justly view “An Equal Music” for the slight work of melodrama that it is.
(And that’s not meant to diss Vikram Seth, for whom I have nothing but deep respect.)
The other dimension, of course, is that if your book is marketable to the American reader (in other words, the middle aged somewhat liberal white woman), you get much more than your fair share of attention. Such people would buy “A God of Small Things”, “A Suitable Boy,” “Interpreter of Maladies,” but they’d probably find “English, August” wayward and maybe even puerile.
competence is not what I go to literature for. I want my world rocked. Amen, brother!
I second George Michael Ondaatje. Bravo!!!!
That is why I am a big fan of Ernest Hemingway and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Bravo!!!
Note: This whole talk about Ivy League is little goofy as I am an Ivy Leaguer………Amardeep and I share alma mater. Ivy League is can highly overrated, sometimes not. Again, live fully.
Bravo to Saheli too for her analyis.
I am in a Bravo mood today.
Right on, GMO. It’s a crying shame that Mr. Chatterjee hasn’t gotten the attention he deserves outside of India. It’s nearly impossible to find his books in the US — in fact I only found his latest “Mammaries of the Welfare of the State”, the “English, August” follow-up — in a Chandigarh bookstore on my last visit to India.
On a side note, his last 2 books are unbelievably dense reads — I started “Mammaries” and “The Last Burden” some time ago but I haven’t been able to finish them!
Bigger picture though, good quality writing attracts readership everywhere, though it may not win prizes or be optioned for a movie or read by “middle aged somewhat liberal white women” (I don’t 100% agree with this profile of the typical American reader, but there’s some truth in it).
Writers with longevity are read long after they are gone — witness Sadat Hasan Manto, Nirad Chaudhuri, R.K. Narayan and others in India, though they are hardly household names in the US & Europe like the Jhumpas or Zadies of today.
I know a good tautology when I see it! 😉