Kiran Desai’s book of life

At nearly 700 pages, it is a long book but one that allows for the kind of intense, sumptuous immersion that can feel for the reader like being under a spell. It is billed as a love story, but you could as easily call it an existentialist epic, a surrealist mystery, or a feat of metafiction. In prose supple and precise, by turns funny and tragic, it examines the legacy of colonialism and Partition; describes romantic and familial alienations; ponders questions of politics and art. Desai’s novel strives to capture nothing less than the fullness of human existence – its paradoxes, eccentricities and wonders – and at its most ambitious, the abyssal, often inexpressible devastation wrought by the loss of self.

Set at the turn of the millennium, it tells the story of two young Indians who are on a journey to build their identities while honouring family and the place they come from. Sonia Shah, a student of literature in the last year of her degree in Vermont, is an aspiring writer. Sonia is lonely: “A certain stage in life was passing, and she needed to wrangle a romantic experience soon.”

Meanwhile, Sunny Bhatia is a journalist at the Associated Press, based in New York. Sunny is in a relationship with a white American woman but keeps it hidden from his widowed mother. As Sonia and Sunny’s grandparents, neighbours in Allahabad, attempt to matchmake them, fate has other plans. Sunny barely pays heed to the letter that arrives from India bearing Sonia’s picture, while Sonia is drawn to Ilan de Toorjen Foss, an eccentric painter 30 years her senior – whom she will come to think of as “the devil himself”. Descended from a wealthy family with colonial ties, he is needy, vain and controlling. Afflicted with mommy issues and dismissive of Sonia’s creative ambitions (“Ahhh – don’t write orientalist nonsense!”), Ilan also turns out to be a married man with “a few bastards”.

Sonia returns to India with a wounded heart, and without Badal Baba, a Tibetan demon amulet that was a gift from her mother to keep her safe, and that Sonia gave to Ilan. Belonging to Sonia’s German theosophist maternal grandfather (who disappeared while searching for the occult in the Himalayas), the amulet serves as a synecdoche of her uprootedness. It also becomes, in the final stretch of the book, the MacGuffin whose recovery gives the plot a thriller-esque propulsion.

Sonia and Sunny meet on a train, when Sunny accompanies a friend to India. Their romance, at once coy and fevered, unfolds over the following years, with complications stemming from visa problems, Sunny’s fiercely possessive mother, and, inevitably, Ilan – whose art, encountered by the lovers in Venice, sends Sonia spiralling into a state of paranoia, marked by visions of a hound.

The story’s dramatic breadth is further widened by subplots involving Sunny’s mother, who enters a risky agreement with her brothers-in-law to sell the family home and lives in constant fear of the underworld; Sonia’s mother, who leaves her unhappy marriage and moves into her father’s art studio in the hill station of Landour; and Sonia’s father, embittered by the split and later diagnosed with cancer.

Desai – never quite an outright tragedian – sustains throughout a riotous, blunder-filled comedy of manners, pitting Sonia’s morally scrupulous and culturally sophisticated family against Sunny’s corrupt and status-hungry relatives, while exposing the delusions and vanity driving both sides. The novel deftly and wittily navigates the faultlines of class, race and religion, as well as the rift between east and west. Desai delights in pointing out droll cultural truisms: “If you were a worthy Indian, you became an American”; “It’s the premise of being American: You are an individual, therefore you are alone. Therefore you must be able to do everything by yourself.” Through Sunny, Desai explores the dissonance of living between worlds – “If India existed, then America could not” – and probes the deeper discomfort of speaking across cultures. There is, she writes, a “fundamental flaw” in a brown person reporting on the brown world for a white audience, “as if he were a white person believing in the centrality of the white world – and because of the central power of western news outlets, also telling the brown world about itself (upside down) from this location.”

While Sunny wrestles with the conundrums of identity and representation, Sonia’s arc, focused in part on her struggle to write about herself, provokes a different, though no less urgent, set of questions – ones that the novel artfully answers through its very form. How does one resist the tired narrative of the older male artist and the younger, aspiring female artist/muse? How to write realistically about the “hallucinatory fear of a woman who believes she has made acquaintance with the devil”? Astutely anatomising creativity and the moral impunity afforded men in the name of so-called high art (Balthus, Gauguin and Picasso are namechecked), this is a book also slyly engaged in thinking about the tropes and cliches that western audiences expect of Indian fiction, and what’s at stake when India is packaged for export: whether such stories, “decorative outside and hollow inside”, cost the nation its seriousness.

As with all big, sprawling books, ultimately, the greatest challenge for the writer is achieving unity – the elegant integration of themes, storylines and inquiries. A love story spanning years of hurdles also demands an ending worthy of its journey. Desai delivers spectacularly.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai is published by Hamish Hamilton (£25). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £21.25. Delivery charges may apply

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