Henry Oliver wrong on Kiran Desai

Henry Oliver writes at Substack- 

Kiran Desai: catching a glimpse in the forest

If by 'forest' you mean the arid wastes that follow on from American degrees in creative writing, then- sure.   

The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia

They are lonely because they are boring and stupid.  

Some writers make their novels out of beautiful, well-turned sentences,

No. All writers make their novels out of two things

1) characters

2) plots

If they tend to dash off 'beautiful, well-turned, sentences' that is what they do. If they write like shit, that is how their novels will be written.  

and some from flowing pages.

Well-turned sentences cause paragraphs and pages to flow. Shitty sentences have the opposite effect. 

I suppose what Oliver means is that some writers have arresting sentences. Others are all the more readable because they don't.  

In the popular jargon, some novelists work at the level of the sentence, crafting their worked-upon language, while others are immersive story-tellers.

This may be jargon but it isn't popular because it is obviously false. Some authors hold up the narrative to exhibit their own preciousness, others don't.  

This second type of writer is more liable to be dismissed by highbrow, aesthete, or flat-out pretentious reviewers, while the first type is likely to be found wanting by a certain sort of practitioner-critic.

So what? Nobody cares about reviewers or critics. J.K Rowling or George R.R Martin are good at what they do. Cunts wot get prizes aren't.  

If there is still such a thing as highbrows who hate middlebrows, this is the topic on which the highs will be roused to a bear-like defence of the narrow principles they hold to be dear and self-evident.

No. What Oliver has asserted is too mild, indeed meaningless, for anyone to get their knickers in a twist over.  

In The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia, as in her previous two novels (The Inheritance of Loss and Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard), Kiran Desai is squarely the second type of author.

No. She has no story to tell. The solipsism of a boring shit head is not 'immersive' story-telling. What stood out about 'Loss' was her contempt for the Gorkhaland movement. Yet, any young person in Darjeeling or Kalimpong``` at the time could see that without devolution and subsidiarity, the hill regions would continue to decline. There was no need for accumulating losses to be the only inheritance available. The region could rise and rise. There was plenty of material for story-telling there save in the places where this silly moo looked for it.  

There is nothing wrong with her sentences:

at first blush, maybe. Look again and they fall apart.  

many are lovely,

they may aim to be. They aren't.  

and some of them have an aphoristic turn:

No. Ipse dixit assertions are aphorisms.  

but she writes pages, not phrases:

but she has nothing interesting to say.  

one often feels the sharp pull at the end of her chapters as the curtain falls, suddenly, and cuts us off from the immersion we had reached.

One really doesn't unless one is White and has to pretend that boring Brown Women matter greatly because...urm... they have to sit down to pee? That must be totes traumatic more particularly if Donald Trump keeps beating them in elections. 

One feels, too, the lack of craft in some of her sentences. But that is no matter:

coz she is Brown.  

indeed, much of the time, it is part of how she makes her immersive pages.

Darkies are stupid. If you want to immerse yourself in their world, you need to make allowances.  

Here is half a page from The Inheritance of Loss, which gives as good a demonstration of this effect as any.


This aqueous season

Saying 'monsoon' or 'rainy season' won't do if you studied creative writing at 3 different American Universities 

would last three months, four, maybe five.

Officially, it lasts three months- when the National Parks are closed- but 'chaturmas' would be more accurate.  

In Cho Oyu, a leak dripping into the toilet played a honky-tonk,

even though the Indian girl hearing it could have no idea of honky-tonk music. Kiran is a careless writer.  

until it was interrupted by Sai, who held an umbrella over herself when she went inside the bathroom.

In other words, Sai is sitting on the toilet holding an umbrella over her head. Way to bury the lead, Kiran! 

Condensation fogged the glass of clocks, and clothes hanging to dry in the attic remained wet for a week.

In which case, they would have smelled like shit. Why does the retired Judge not get his servant to iron the clothes dry? Alternatively, let the dhobi do it. Services are cheap in India.  

A white scurf sifted down from the beams, a fungus spun a shaggy age over everything.

Spiders spin. Fungi spread. 

Bits of color, though, defined this muffled scene:

Colour can't define that which is muffled. Bits of colour can variegate a scene.  

insects flew in carnival gear;

fuck would a North Indian Hindu know about carnivals?  

bread, in a day, turned green as grass;

Why not eat it fresh?  

Sai, pulling open her underwear drawer, found a bright pink jelly scalloping the layers of dreary cotton; and the bound volumes of National Geographic fell open to pages bruised with flamboyant disease, purple-yellow molds rivaling the bower birds of Papua New Guinea, the residents of New Orleans, and the advertisements—“It’s better in the Bahamas!”—that it showcased.

This is interesting. An analogy is being made between a young woman's underwear drawer and the pages of the National Geographic- in the pages of which the oldest of Kiran's Professors saw their first pictures of naked boobs.  

Sai had always been calm and cheerful during these months,

Indians are calm and cheerful during the monsoons. This period of 'chaturmas' is when peripatetic sages make a halt and spend their time preaching the true doctrine. 

the only time when her life in Kalimpong was granted perfect sense and she could experience the peace of knowing that communication with anyone was near impossible.

Fewer tourists? I suppose, a girl might like a respite from boring relatives seeking to escape the heat of Calcutta.  

She sat on the veranda, riding the moods of the season, thinking how intelligent it was to succumb as all over Kalimpong modernity began to fail. Phones emitted a death rattle,

Very few had phones back then. They could fail just as well in arid Udaipur as rainy Darjeeling.  

televisions tuned into yet another view of the downpour.

Few had TVs in Kalimpong in the mid Eighties. Transmission had only begun in 1982.  

And in this wet diarrheal season floated the feeling, loose and light, of life being a moving, dissipating thing…

This may be literary loose motion but the theme of a young isolated virgin is a promising one. After all, for our species, who fucks whom matters greatly.

Perhaps you can nit-pick some of this, depending on your tastes and the extent to which your critical attitudes are based in the enforcement of persnickety “rules” of composition, but one can hardly deny that the passage as a whole works to establish “the peace of knowing that communication with anyone was near impossible”.

Nonsense! It is obvious that the virgin can communicate with some local bloke. Her being cut off from non-locals is only significant in that respect.

The reason Kiran's writing is shit is because she doesn't take any pains to describe things as her protagonist would see them. If she troubled to do so, those characters might start to develop a life of their own. They can create their own drama.  

Desai gives a full sense of the mood of the place she wishes you to inhabit.

No. She is doing 'chick-lit'. There's a girl who is cut off from the wider world. Will some cute boy enter her life? You betcha! Help yourself to a choccie and read on.  

To achieve this, her narrative voice is not bounded by the character

because she is lazy and stupid 

or what the character can observe. It acts like the camera in a film:

No. It acts like shite taught to you by elderly American professors of uncreative dreck.  

the character is seen in and against the background of their surroundings,

as opposed to what? The Andromeda Galaxy?  

and we are narrated to with a fluid ease.

She herself refers to diarrhea.

Sometimes we are bounded by character perspective;

Not often enough. We get that a young girl might be grossed out by fungi in her underwear drawer. We also get that she might want to get some better use from her vagina than is currently the case before it too becomes mildewed or cobwebbed. But why jump to the National Geographic? It did have naked nipples but not ginormous dongs. Boys, back in the Fifties, were interested in it. Girls weren't.  

sometimes the camera cuts, flips perspective, gives us the sense of looking at another corner of the room, while the action can be heard off-camera.

This cold only be said if Kiran wrote in a cinematic style. She doesn't.  

In the London Review of Books, Adam Mars Jones quoted this paragraph as an instance of this narrative scope.

She took the route by the Good Fortune Trading Company and the mysterious, deserted Buddhist monastery slung with barbed wire.

This is promising. Will the promise be kept? 

The Farragut Projects were to the left; a low buzz from the Con Ed station emitted from the right.

That's bad English. The Con Ed station emitted the buzz. It didn't emit itself.  

Rats competed with pigeons over stale discarded pitta in the dumpster outside the pitta factory, and a smell of bilge water rose from the Navy Yard,

This is lazy writing. Pitta factory=discarded pitta. Navy Yard= bilge water.  

which was overrun by a band of feral cats that suffered from feline leukaemia.

as opposed to the canine variety.  

She passed by the empty lot where trucks were hosed down, the place that made industrial metal sinks, past Los Papi’s, past the oversize parking lot drenched with chemical waste owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses. She walked down towards the river away from a luxury high-rise, a middle finger to the poor.

Not to mention the feral cats struggling with the social stigma of feline leukaemia. It really isn't true that you only get if by having butt sex with a West African monkey.  

Although he accepts a “hum and whiff of the real” in such passages,

because the protagonist is a shitty writer and probably does have only cliches in her stream of consciousness 

of another similar section he comments: “Divorce the character from the sensations that surround him, as this passage does, and the narrative conventions start to unravel.”

In other words, Stupid Brown Woman can get under the skin of a character who is a Stupid Brown Woman exactly like herself, but she can't do the same thing when it comes to a Stupid Brown Male  

But this assumes that a narrative must be tied to the character.

No. It merely suggests that novels work better where this is done. True you can have the character Bugs Bunny who stands around nibbling at carrots while the narrative of Hamlet proceeds, but  

Whereas, Desai’s immersive method, like Scott’s, aims at being bounded not by character, but by theme. Desai is a writer of custom and place

but she seems to have only a very superficial knowledge of Indian customs and places 

and of the individual within the story;

What story? 

not in the traced, embedded, threaded sense of much fiction, but as a film-maker would see them.

Good novels can be turned into good films easily enough. Kiran doesn't write good novels. Why? She neither story-boards them, nor pays attention to word choice as her sentences unfold.  

Scott’s recreation of a social order is

the product of profound local knowledge plus plenty of research. Kiran is ignorant & lazy.  

akin to Desai’s: she, too, is trying to immerse us in a world-view.

No. Scott wrote for his own people as much as for the English. His world-view had political ramifications. Kiran isn't writing for Indians. Chetan Bhagat is. As for Indian-Americans- they want to be Mindy Kaling or Vivek Ramaswamy not some sad loser teaching Creative Writing or, worse yet, churning out dreck so as to 'diversify' or 'decolonize' a shitty curriculum.  

Whereas Scott’s was a world-view lost to history,

It was a historical world-view which can't be lost to history because he wrote it down very fucking well indeed.   

Desai is trying to immerse us in a world-view that is across the street, in our train, next to us at the office, but out of which we remain, too often, locked.

This is only true of people in a coma. Once we read Kiran's CV, we can pretty much predict what she will see and what she will say about it even if it isn't there to be seen.  

Her defence of fiction—because The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia is an apology for the novel—

an apology for a novel. The novel needs no apologies so long as JK Rowling keeps churning the stuff out. 

is an apology for a whole way of seeing the world.

It is the stupid way a Professor of useless shite sees a world in which she is wholly irrelevant.  

And because that way of seeing is not the Western way,

coz Kiran is brown. But she has lived in the US since the age of 14. Moreover, the bit of India she was raised in was Western- i.e. provincial English circa 1935- not Hindu in any respect.  

but the way of an Indian immigrant,

one whose Mum became a Professor of creative writing when she was about 14. There are only about one or two such creatures. The Indian immigrant, by and large, is either a Doctor or Engineer or else a truck driver or wannabe motel owner. But the 'way of seeing' for all upwardly mobile immigrants is much of a muchness. 

it requires a different narrative mode.

It really doesn't.  

Desai is not exactly Scott-esque, but she is more Scott than traditionally English in the Austen-James mode as a narrator.

James was American. Scott admired Austen and readily confessed that he didn't have her talent for anything but 'the big Bow Wow strain'. I suppose he was hinting that his dick was bigger than Jane's. I once made a similar suggestion to Charlotte Bronte but she promptly pulled up her skirt and revealed a ginormous dong. It's the sort of thing which might drive a man to drink.  

Scott writes of history,

interesting history 

Desai of culture.

She has none. She writes the sort of shite American Colleges teach darkies to write.  

In The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia, Desai’s immersive method is presented as an almost-explicit alternative to

stuff people actually like reading because it isn't stupid, boring, shite.  

the minimalism of auto-fiction.

which need not be boring and stupid.  

Early on, the narrator says:

After ramen, Sonia settled to writing stories for her senior thesis in literature and creative writing.

Sadly, she wasn't studying something useful like Accountancy.  

Missing her family made her strongly conjure India.

Because she could get away with writing nonsense about distant Ind.  

She began a childhood fable about a boy who climbed into a tree and lived like a monkey until he became one, a process complicated by his being mistaken for a holy hermit.

Like R.K Narayan's 'Guide'. Hollywood bought the rights. Pearl S Buck wrote the screen-play. The deracinated aspect of Kiran's plot is that in actual India kids climb trees. Sadly, they aren't allowed to remain there. Mummies tend to be rather strict on this point. In the actual novel, the guy who climbs the tree is a former Post Office clerk who knows all the local gossip and thus can appear clairvoyant. 

For those readers who are already admirers of Desai’s work,

because she is so BRAVE! Imagine being a Brown Woman- who must have been raped, beaten, decapitated and subjected to fat shaming at a succession of pricey US colleges- and who nevertheless managed to write worthless shite! Isn't that worth celebrating?

this short, dry paragraph is an amusing moment.

So amusing that many readers shat themselves laughing? 

It is not just that Sonia studies in Vermont, which is where Desai studied creative writing: Desai’s first novel, Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard,

In 1978, Merchant Ivory produced the shitty 'Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures'. Perhaps people thought the word was of Indian origin. 

is indeed about “a boy who climbed into a tree and lived like a monkey until he became one, a process complicated by his being mistaken for a holy hermit.”

It really isn't. At the end of the novel, the dude turns into a guava fruit- or so people think. I think it is safe to say, this dude doesn't really read the shite produced by Brown Women for the purpose of aesthetic affirmative action.  

Unlike many modern authors who make such explicit allusions to themselves within the details of their characters, Desai does not write in a style so carefully minimal it becomes empty (Rachel Cusk)

White and thus less BRAVE than Kiran 

or in one so purple it almost outpaces Laurence Durrell (Deborah Levy)

also White. I suspect she may once have had talent 

or with such an insistent usage of Twitter discourse that the narrator is simply a continuation of the new modish International Style (Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, and, very often, Erin Somers).

Nothing wrong in that at all. We're all keen to improve our style in that respect

Desai has that refreshing, novelistic, quality of writing like herself, not merely about herself.

Everybody writes like themselves, unless they try really hard not to.  

It is this quality that has typically distinguished the autobiographical realist novel from the modern auto-fiction novel. It ought to feel old-fashioned. Instead, it is a fresh reassertion of talent.

Because it is done by a person who isn't just Brown. They also have to sit down to pee. If that isn't a good enough reason to put them on the curriculum, I can't imagine what is.  

These are all reductive categories, of course, of course, but it can hardly be denied that there is a flatness, an idleness, to so much of the new International Style of Prose.

Imbecility is the true problem here.  

One might assert that Ben Lerner or Sheila Heti write in this minimalism without having such a flat affect. But they cannot sustain it; their books soon sink. It is as if a generation of writers has self-trained themselves on the ability to write at the perfect length to make the new International Style polished and piquant for an edition of n+1 or the New Yorker, but lack the ability to make it work for the length of a book as a sustained and integrated part of the immersive story.

Fair point. But what is the reason for it? The answer is lack of imagination and the weakness of the underlying idea or conceit.  

One feels tired just imagining a Henry James-length book written in this manner.

One feels even more tired imagining such imagining.  

One of the great benefits of Desai’s prose is her ability to set a scene.

A benefit of any type of language is that it can set a scene.  

One dawn hour, after the temperature had suddenly risen and Sonia could hear the snow outside Ilan’s house growing sudsy and retreating, the forest dripping, the drip percolating through the moss into the earth, she set out as if for an early morning walk. She left no incriminating footsteps.

One morning she slyly fucked off without leaving a note. Cool.  

There are some cliches here (percolating, incriminating footsteps) but the patchwork matters more than the details of every stitch:

The patchwork doesn't matter at all. We get that the protagonist leaving her older lover is comparable to a morning in Spring. Will there be a new love? Maybe a baby? No. We are speaking of a very dim bulb indeed. 

Desai is splendid at this sort of balance.

Fair point. She doesn't get your hopes up. You know the book will be uniformly crap.  

The obvious comparison is V.S. Naipaul.

Who was fine when he was writing about Trinidad. Kiran is shit when writing about India.  

From the opening of The Enigma of Arrival:

For the first four days it rained.

Noah's flood was caused by 40 days of rain. Where has Naipaul been cast up?  

I could hardly see where I was.

He had made land-fall- but where? Only slowly does the curtain lift to reveal the lie of the land.  

Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and out-buildings in front of my cottage I saw fields with stripped trees on the boundaries of each field; and far away, depending on the light, glints of the little river, glints which sometimes appeared, oddly, to be above the level of the land.

Naipaul wants us to understand that he was a man of the city. The English countryside was strange to him. Could he settle down and feel at home in an alien landscape?  

We cannot quite say that Desai or Naipaul are novelists in the manner of Walter Scott,

they weren't trying to be. I suppose both think India or the West Indies have shitty history unworthy of the Walter Scott treatment.  

but there is a shared quality of place and atmosphere between the three of them. Compare to this passage from Ivanhoe:

The sun was setting upon one of the rich grassy glades of that forest, which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; in others they receded from each other, forming those long sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye delights to lose itself, while imagination considers them as the paths to yet wilder scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun shot a broken and discoloured light, that partially hung upon the shattered boughs and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they illuminated in brilliant patches the portions of turf to which they made their way.

Scott was writing for people who were interested in what types of trees a forest might contain. After all, they owned estates and kept an eye on timber prices. But landscape gardening too commanded a significant market. I wouldn't be surprised if mini-forests were created on great Country Estates to match Scott's description.  

There is always more of Scott, but we can see in common an essential ability to turn little cliches or “dull phrases” to a more splendid whole.

Scott was a Lord of the language. He didn't deal in cliches.  

Nothing in the Naipaul paragraph is a cliche, exactly, but nor are any of the elements strikingly original. The aim of this writing is to use good, solid prose, with a clear voice, to establish an immersive sense of place.

Naipaul doesn't want his reader to get immersed in rural Wiltshire and the pub gossip about Stephen Tennant and so forth. He wanted to establish a subjective feeling of, not oikeiosis as such, but serenity- the feeling that this is the roof under which you would not be ashamed to die.  

It should be mentioned that Naipaul had tried to write a purely English novel some 25 years previously. It failed for the same reason that 'Enigma' failed. Naipaul didn't have a ear for spoken English. To give an example he doesn't get that a person who describes himself as a 'down and out Tory' means he is poor but, like George Orwell, he is posh. Naipaul must have read 'Down and out in Paris & London'. Yet he thinks 'down and out Tory' is a mix of 'downright' Tory and 'out and out' Tory. But neither phrase is used. You may be 'downright' in your opposition to a particular thing- e.g. fox hunting- but that doesn't alter your tribal identity as Tory or Labour. If you are a member of the Tory party and canvass for the party during elections and make your allegiance plain you may be described as 'an outright' Tory but only by nutters who think Mrs. Thatcher is Hitler in drag. On the other hand, there is a long tradition of leading English men of letters producing howlers yet more egregious. 

In contrast, Hemingway is the presiding figure of the International Style minimalists.

He had interesting stories to tell. A good wine needs no bush.  

He explains why he adopted a bare style in 'farewell to arms'. He was with the Italian forces during the Great War. He wasn't a patriot of that country and thus their talk of glory or sacrifice was meaningless to him. 

He says 'There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot. He was born one. He left with Peduzzi in the car to go back to Gorizia.'

The next paragraph, which Oliver quotes, paints from memory a scene familiar to millions of men Hemingway's age

It stormed all that day. The wind drove down the rain and everywhere there was standing water and mud. The plaster of broken houses was gray and wet. Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from our number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping.

That is a landscape worth describing because it changed history. It changed psychology. It changed literature. It is foolish to quote Hemingway if you are talking about Desai or Naipaul or other such dim bulb beneficiaries of affirmative action  

This is not merely an argument about style, about which sorts of sentences are “better”. It is a question of suiting the action to the word. As Desai’s narrator says, the way you tell the story is cultural.

Only in the sense that any use of language is cultural. I suppose one might speak of 'sub-cultures' and particular literary genres or cliques. But that is a subject of little intrinsic interest

This was India, she thought. You might try and write a slender story, but it inevitably connected to a larger one. The sense could never be contained.

Borges never visited India but he constructed a pretty good story 'search for al-Mutasim' out of scraps of Kipling. 

The International Style is not capable of writing a novel like Sunny and Sonia.

Kiran's style isn't Indian. It isn't particularly American. I suppose we could call it International or, more accurately, crap. The plain fact is, a good novel may be written in a bad style but not vice versa This is because if the novel is bad, the style can't be good. It must always bee subordinated to what is of substance.

It has reached a dead end, ideologically, stylistically, narratively.

Style simply doesn't matter. I've no idea whether '3 body problem' is written in a good or a lousy style. One thing I'm certain off. It doesn't represent a dead-end. Kiran or Jhumpa Lahiri's oeuvre does.  

It is shrinking the novel at a time when the world is becoming weirder, more alarming, less predictable. The narrative mode of the isolated individual author who will not fictionalize has no answer to modernity, no ability to depict the decentralized kaleidoscope of the world today.

When was this not true?  

Desai, however, does. And a large part of Sunny and Sonia is about what fiction can say about the Indian diaspora,

Fuck does Oliver know about the Indian diaspora? Less than Kiran- but that's not saying much.  

and how it can say it.

how boringly it can say it- maybe.  

A large part of the story is concerned with whether Sonia will be able to write her book.

Not whether it will be crap. That's a foregone conclusion. 

Eventually, her creative impulse has been deadened by too much literary criticism at college

rather than the fact that she is boring and stupid 

and she takes on very modern attitudes about fiction.

“Are you writing your stories at least?” Mama asked Sonia. Mama remembered the beautiful one about the boy who sat up in a tree with his beloved langur monkeys.

Mama thinks Sonia is retarded. She should write nice stories or do finger painting.  

“It was oriental nonsense,” proclaimed Sonia. “And it feels childish and absurd to make things up. After a while you want to write the truth, plain and simple.”

Why make up stuff in the hope of being entertaining when you can focus on writing boring shite about what it is like to be a boring shithead? 

Here Desai directly expresses the auto-fiction perspective. Rachel Cusk has said she found the “making things up” aspect of fiction “fake and embarrassing”. Sonia’s use of “oriental” here shows how she has subordinated her creative impulse to ideas of criticism, theory, and politics.

India is to the East of the US. Orient means East. Orientalism has acquired the meaning of depicting the East in a stereotyped & derogatory manner. Indians who live in the West but write shitty books about the East are considered inferior to those who can write in an interesting manner about the West.

Later on, her mother tells her she gave up on her talent, and she replies: “It’s not so simple. You have to live enough life for a book.”

Not if it is fiction. All you need is imagination.  

Sunny and Sonia is indeed full of life, rather than being full of consciousness devoid of activity, the sole and often rather minor focus on the minimalists. Sunny and Sonia is expansive, like a quest. “Do you think you have one?” the mother asks—meaning, do you have a story?

“I catch a glimpse in the forest,” Sonia replies.

You may glimpse a deer in the forest. That doesn't give you the story of Bambi. Apparently, its author had previously written a successful erotic novel about a Viennese prostitute. 

This is the essence of Sunny and Sonia’s quest.

Sight-seeing maybe. Quests are arduous.  

The two main characters wander the world like knights traversing through the forest

battling other knights? No. So, not like knights at all.  Why not say 'Sunny is Robin Hood. Sonia is Maid Marion.' 

(Naipaul makes a major allusion to the Arthurian legends in The Enigma of Arrival, also).

He was a student of Tolkien. His new home is 20 miles away from Camelot. If he was re-reading 'Sir Gawain', it is because his contemporaries were doing so too. Unlike, Amis, Naipaul didn't try to bring in the supernatural.

They go to New York, India, Italy, always in search of a sense of home, the ability to live by their own lights, the capacity to be honest.

i.e. buy high quality real estate for peanuts and then live out a fantasy of being a French Marquis or a Moroccan Sheikh or Hindoooo Maharaja.  

They also go on journeys of the mind, in search of identity, meaning, creative potential. But wherever you go, you take the inheritance of your upbringing and your culture with you.

No. You can take your skills with you. You may be able to take some of your money with you. To transplant your culture, you need a bunch of people willing to resettle and colonize or otherwise demographically replace indigenous people. Sunny & Sonia aren't setting up temples and engaging in real estate operations which will create cultural enclaves for their own people.

The narrative camera is tethered to world, the theme, as much as the character to show us exactly this sense of place—they are not displaced, but rather that cannot not take India with them wherever they go.

They could move there easily enough. Their excuse for not doing so is Modi. Did you know he is a Nazi?  

They carry the loneliness of being immigrants,

but there's a fuck ton of immigrants in the US. They could party every day with folks from the old country. 

of not being at home at home, to all their new locations.

This getting racist. Brown people don't feel at home in the homes they have paid for. The kindest thing would be to deport them. 

“Divorce the character from the sensations that surround him”, as Mars Jones has it, and you give the reader some sense of what that means.

Why bother? Just say 'Usha Vance is Hindoooo. She should fuck off back to Hindooland.  

Sunny’s girlfriend in New York is unable to see things from his point of view, and he is unable to see them from hers.

This occurs most frequently when they are facing each other. The girl sees Sunny but Sunny can't see himself. Targic! 

Sunny sipped his Basque wine. Secretly he was thinking that this woman had some nerve to go from her New York City apartment—no doubt equipped with a stove, microwave, toaster, fridge, blender, coffee maker, hair dryer, vacuum cleaner, television, computer, music system, heater, fan, air conditioner, boiler, furnace, if not also a bicycle or car—to tell women in India to cook their rice in a cardboard box covered with silver reflective paper so as to prevent deforestation and climate change.

Why think this secretly? Anyway, the thing is an obvious scam being paid for by some Gaia-raping billionaire who wants to pretend that he is saving the planet in some shithole far far away. 

At home Sunny said: “Ulla, why did you say I put curry in everything?

I didn't put curry into your vagina when I went down on you.  

I put spices in everything, not curry in everything.

Oh. He did put chilli pepper in her vag. She should leave him.  

There’s no such thing as curry, in fact. It’s a fake word invented by the British.”

Brits invented English. They also ruled India which is why Sunny & Sonia speak English. Since they are North Indian, they object to the Tamil word 'kari' gaining currency. 

He distinctly heard his mother’s voice in his ear say, Who is this stupid person?

If you are hearing Mummy's voice in your ears when you should be boning your g.f., you are iether Gay or a character in a shitty novel by Kiran Desai. 

Desai is both wry and plangent when she describes their culture clash: “Why was it that in the Western world, snooping to uncover a crime was a worse crime than the actual crime?

Because, in the West, people paid detectives to uncover actual crime and to build prosecution cases against genuine criminals. In the East, snoopers get stitches unless their targets are weaker than themselves in which case they are merely bullies or a nuisance.

Ulla’s civilization was built upon not snooping and wandering about naked.

Plenty of North Europeans are into nudism. I suppose North India inherited a degree of Islamic prudery but there are plenty of 'naked' monastic orders. 

Sunny’s civilization was based on donning your clothes and listening to every conversation.”

This may be true of an idealized or 'Salafi' Islam. It has nothing to do with Hinduism. It must be said, there were plenty of naked (uryan) Sufi Saints.  

As the story moves on (I shall not spoil it for you, the only way to appreciate this splendid book is to read it; no summary can be sufficient), the title becomes more and more meaningful. There are so many ways for these two characters to be lonely.

There is only one. Be boring and zero fun to be with.  

They can be lonely without meeting, after meeting, while they are together, when they are separated for good, when they meet again, expectedly or otherwise. When you travel with the essential loneliness of the immigrant, you cannot keep control of the narrative of your life.

That's why immigrants are bad. Deport them. Look at Mamdani. He only became a citizen in 2018. He must be feeling terribly lonely. Trump should give him a one-way ticket to Kampala.  

The camera will jump outside of you and your control. In this way, we do not perceive the world as the characters do.

No. We perceive Kiran's shitty world view. She is a boring fart.  

Instead, we see them as they are held and surrounded by the world.

Which world? Not the one Mamdani lives in. 

Sonia went down to the ocean.

But she didn't go down on it. Ocean considered this an act of blatant homophobia.  

After the ocean goes pink and orange, before it goes indigo and the dusk turns to dark, the ocean turns very pale and is still. Its movement becomes absorbed in this shade of milk

this is ocean-as-womb motif which elderly creative writing Professors gassed on about fifty years ago.  

it levitates, otherworldly. Sonia floated on her back—it was like being rocked in a cradle. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed this way.

Was it nine months?  

Sonia will write her book by managing to see what she cannot see.

In other words, she will acquire as much 'theory of mind' as a three year old. That is a great achievement.  

Her ability to imagine the world beyond her—just beyond her, the “hum and whiff of the real” that is not within her eye-line or earshot, that is the basis of writing fiction.

No. It is the basis of a toddler not eating the cookies even if Mummy is out of the room.  

Not the tightly controlled narrative mode of bounding the narrator to the character, which has become so narrow and minimal, but the grand, rolling style of Naipaul and Scott

why not say 'Shakespeare & Donald Trump' ? 

and Dickens, the novels that spill out and show their whole world.

Dickens's novels were avidly read by his own people. His books helped change the society he wrote about.  Desai's books are shit. Indians think she is more, not less, boring and stupid than her Mummy. Where is Mira Nair and where is Kiran Desai? 

All questers are caught midway on the path.

They are caught short on that path. The questing fewmets they discover are their own shit.  

All writers are questing to catch a glimpse in the forest.

None are. Not even Desai. She has earned back her advance. Nothing more can be expected of her.  

That is what Desai has achieved.

It is where she has failed. Mira Nair's 'Monsoon Wedding' is fairly full of life.  

The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia is

boring shite.  

full of the life that the International Style and auto-fiction removed from fiction. The ending has everything you expect and a lot that you don’t. Strange, romantic, wild, ambitious.

Hokum. Mystical amulets are of interest only to Indiana Jones. Two boring losers swim go for a swim in Goa. Will they or won't they? Who fucking cares? The immigrant experience is about having babies and hoping they will do better than you. So is the non-immigrant experience. Loneliness isn't a bad thing in itself but it is the aut liberi, aut libri price you pay for not raising a family or, at the very least, working in a collegiate manner for the public good.