Quickie book review – I’m-on-the-road edition

Kiran Desai’s new book, The Inheritance Of Loss, soft-launched last month, and I picked up a copy at Barnes & Noble. It’s a good tale with a globalization undercurrent connecting IndiaŽs Nepal border with New York City.

Her previous book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was a well-written magically realist vignette on the line between a novel and a novella. Despite the fruitarian title, it was excellent. Her new one is far more ambitious. Rushdie has a highly complimentary but generic blurb on the back of the new one, which I take to mean he hasn’t read the new one yet. Only having read her mom Anita Desai’s Booker-nominated work Fasting, Feasting so far, IÂ’d say I enjoy her writing more than her motherÂ’s (whose work I also enjoy).

She also gets in a bunch of wicked jabs at non-vegetarians, Brits, upper-class New Yorkers, 2nd genners and so on, sheÂ’s not playing safe here. ItÂ’s mutinous that way, just like The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories by Lavanya Sankaran.

(Desai is a far better show-not-tell writer — I liked Carpet because itÂ’s sassy, and I could completely relate to all the jabs at 2nd gen dating; itŽs like an American version of Life IsnÂ’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. Also, sheŽs an ex-WSJer and seems to be a conservative, which I mention only to boost sales in the Vinod – Razib segment. SankaranŽs biggest f*-you goes out to Mumbaikars who look down on Bangalore, but sheŽs riding the outsourcing publicity wave, so it isn’t quite the declaration of independence it seems.)

My complaints:

• The usual gender one — I often like male authors better, they move plot faster (Vikram Chandra, Rushdie); this book lacks motion, and is sometimes PG-rated where it should be R (a scene where an auntie receives the mildest of insults from a guerilla chieftain) and R where it should be PG (explicit booger jokes)
• Like just about all American 2nd genners, the thrust of the story focuses on the motherland on the assumption that thatÂ’s the biggest market; sheÂ’s borderline 1-1.5 gen, so she has a small excuse
• Which editor allowed through the hundreds of sequential question marks and exclamation points???!!! Makes the editing look amateur and is a pain to read.

Otherwise, highly recommended. Flippant, funny and mutinous as all hell. Sometimes a treatise rather than a novel, but much less so than Carpet, and that makes it all the more entertaining– frankly, there’s a lot to be said.

Desai is reading in Manhattan Feb. 1 at the Rubin Museum of Art, a major Himalayan art collection (via SAJA).