THE DREAM BUILDERS

Losses great and small haunt the denizens of a glittering new city in India.

In the summer of 2018, Maneka Roy, who's lived in the U.S. for a dozen years, visits the rising and opulent city of Hrishipur to visit her father after the death of her mother. Natives of Calcutta, where they brought her up, Maneka’s parents had relocated to Hrishipur so her mother could pursue a longed-for teaching career after her husband's retirement. (Once there, they ominously lost most of their modest nest egg when the development including the dream apartment they had invested in goes bust.) Maneka is drawn into the varied social circle inhabited by Ramona, an old acquaintance now living in Hrishipur. One of the “beautiful girls” back in high school, Ramona seems emblematic of the glitz and glamour of the Oz-like new city. Through a series of interlocking accounts, each told from the perspective of someone in or attached to Ramona’s orbit, Mukherjee reveals the actual forces at work behind the glamorous facade of the dream city: loneliness, frustration, classism, misogyny, economic uncertainty, jealousy, disenfranchisement…and worry. People striving to get ahead or stay afloat in Hrishipur lose much-needed jobs, fear the loss of those jobs, and fight battles with ennui and increasingly competitive global market forces. Looming above this all, like an actual illuminated beacon, are the Trump Towers being (contentiously) developed by a famous U.S. developer and his family. Tensions between a traditional way of life and a more modern global approach are exemplified by Maneka’s father’s wish to return to the comforts of Calcutta. His wife’s death has left him alone in a place where he knows few and where the exclusive malls and shops hold little allure for him. Hrishipur itself assumes a characterlike role in this narrative woven from many detailed threads.

Mukherjee artfully demonstrates that even a new civilization can have its discontents.