A GREAT COUNTRY

A tween’s arrest throws his Indian American family into disarray.

The latest novel from Gowda starts as it means to go on, with this sentence: “While twelve-year-old Ajay sat trembling in a jail cell, his parents were enjoying themselves at a dinner party.” What follows is a long exploration of racism, classism, and ableism, with the contrasts between the privileged and the less so heightened to a fever pitch. Ajay is a shy boy, the son of Indian immigrants in California, likely autistic with an abiding interest in robots and drones. His brutal arrest, at the hands of an overzealous cop, comes after he flies his prized drone near John Wayne Airport in Orange County. His arrest roils his family: his parents, Priya and Ashok, and his sisters, social-justice-focused Deepa and high school athlete Maya, who are both keeping secrets from their parents. Priya and Ashok live by their own code: “work hard, don’t make waves, keep placing one foot in front of the other on each new rung that appeared before them”; they have trouble squaring that with the possibility that Ajay has been racially profiled. Deepa disdains them for not bothering “to look back at who was left behind.” The novel follows the aftermath of the arrest, as Priya and Ashok enlist a lawyer recommended by a wealthy friend; said friend later is accused of casteism at his company. Gowda’s narration is fast-paced, and she is gifted at building suspense, but the prose sometimes falls flat and the dialogue too often echoes movie cliches. The book is bound to draw comparisons to Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (2017), but it has more in common with ​​Paul Haggis’ heavy-handed 2004 film, Crash.

This well-intentioned effort just doesn’t land.