A richly informative but didactic tale about the clash of old and new in India.
An Indian activist and an American architect team up to take on an emerging right-wing movement in this debut novel.
Sompur, India. It’s 2005, and 30-year-old Meena Kaul is the director of Behera House, a women’s shelter with a mission to combat the country’s rampant domestic abuse. Meena is spearheading the building of a newer, larger campus for the organization, though this has caused some tension in her household, as her husband, Keshav Narayan—India’s leading sustainable architect—was passed over in favor of a Western designer. That Westerner is the American Simon Bliss, who is searching for redemption following an accident at one of his previous buildings. Dissatisfied with his own marriage, Simon becomes enamored with the brilliant and beautiful Meena before he even meets her. When an economic downturn causes Meena to lose her funding, she receives a proposal from an unexpected source. The right-wing Hindu Democratic Party offers a grant, though Meena suspects it is only doing so in order to gain traction among female voters ahead of a 2006 election. “There’s no way in hell we’re taking their dirty loot,” protests one of Meena’s staffers, “at least not while I’m here. It’s an ultra-right-wing cabal. If elected, they’ll destroy whatever progress we’ve made on women’s rights over the last hundred years.” Even so, Meena considers taking the deal. But Simon can see that they may be making a devil’s bargain. As it becomes clear that Behera’s patron, Madhav Behera—as well as Kesh—is increasingly in the pocket of the HDP, Simon and Meena must work to keep the shelter free from its grip—even if to do so means making enemies with some very powerful people.
Langer’s prose is lucid and wonderfully detailed, particularly when it comesto the architecture: “Suddenly four magnificent stone towers loomed ahead. Each façade consisted of vertical ribs curving inward and culminating in a mushroom-like stone cap. Deep horizontal spaces cut across the ribs, giving the impression that the tower was made up of a thousand sheets of paper, each suspended by a thin layer of air.” The novel does an excellent job showing the dangers faced by women in certain traditional societies as well as the platform and political strategies of the HDP. But in purely narrative terms, the book is a bit underwhelming. The plot moves quite slowly—as one might expect of a story that focuses on the less-than-thrilling world of non-governmental organization grants—and the romance at the center of it feels rather forced. Meena, the obvious protagonist of the tale, takes a back seat to Simon (and, to an extent, Kesh), diluting the work’s feminist message. Indeed, the very presence of Simon as a co-protagonist is perhaps a fatal flaw in the story’s conception. Readers will certainly learn a lot from this volume—Langer is extremely successful at bringing the time and place to vivid life—but beyond that sense of transportation, this is not much joy to be found here.
A richly informative but didactic tale about the clash of old and new in India.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Dryad Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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