PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN MADLY IN LOVE

A literary novel tells the story of a struggling Indian author in three romantic periods of her life.

Farida Cooper is interviewing to be an analyst in the consumer research department at the Chicago firm The Mandalay Market when she suddenly bursts into tears. Her interviewer, Percy Faber, has just told her that her lack of an MBA disqualifies her for such a position: “Her security rested on four supports: first, a job; next, an education to improve her chances for a better job; third, a home for sanctuary when the world became unmanageable; and last, a man to share her load.” Currently, all four things are threatened. The unemployed, 50-year-old aspiring author is 10 years into a master’s degree in English at a school that is trying to kick her out, and she will soon run out of money for rent. Percy, a widower who comes from the same Bombay Parsi community as Farida, takes pity on her and invents a position for her at the firm, and his interest in this intense woman grows the more he learns about her. Interwoven with Farida’s present are the stories of her two great romantic affairs: one with the celebrated literary theorist Horace Fisch and the other with Darius Katrak, a precocious 17-year-old student in Bombay to whom she was supposedly giving art lessons. The threads depict a female artist at three stages in her life, always finding herself at odds with the culture around her and claiming that rules are made to be broken. Desai’s prose is tidy and mannered in a way that mirrors its intellectual characters: “They finished in silence, Farida afraid she had focused too glaringly on herself, Percy wondering how he might help. Ascending in the elevator to the office again he invited her to a discussion of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” It’s a long, slow novel that asks a lot of readers, particularly in its early sections in which Farida comes off as more than a little conceited. But as readers gain greater insight into the experiences that shaped Farida, the book becomes a satisfying, if somewhat antiquated, character study.

An unhurried but immersive tale of ambition and love.