MEET US BY THE ROARING SEA

An AI programmer’s mourning process takes her into her own past and the unusual manuscript she’s translating.

Kumarasamy’s slippery debut novel concerns an unnamed young woman whose mother has recently died. To stay connected with her Tamil heritage—and her interest in language and communication—she dedicates herself to translating a document written years earlier by a group of female students at a South Indian medical school. In the meantime, she’s assisting a friend with art projects and cohabitating in her family's Queens house with cousin Rosalyn, who has opened their home to a homeless veteran who’s appeared on a popular reality show called Soldiers’ Diaries. (We’re in a near future where the military occupies “stabilization zones” in unnamed places and citizens are obligated to keep their “carbon score” low.) And at work, she’s shoveling data sets into an AI model she’s nicknamed Bogey and discussing the nature of consciousness with co-workers. Where is all this going? Kumarasamy’s language can be delightfully lyrical: “All along you think you have control, moving along a straight line, from one point to another, but really you’re spinning with the earth so deep in that vortex of girlhood.” It can also be frustratingly abstract. (A line the protagonist asks of the Tamil manuscript might apply to this book: “Why is your syntax so elliptical?...Is this a testimony, a final note, written to no one, everyone?”) Kumarasamy’s core interest is with “radical compassion,” a term the medical students use often to discuss their obligation to alleviate others’ suffering. Our own struggles to articulate that compassion—symbolized here in shows like Soldiers’ Diaries or AI or other technologies—reflect either human nature or a human problem that requires solving. Difficult emotions may require difficult writing, but Kumarasamy’s demanding approach creates less a well-woven story and more a mass of interesting but unbraided tendrils.

Intensely mournful but jagged storytelling.