KEYA DAS'S SECOND ACT

Years after a young woman’s death in a car crash, a hidden trove of her belongings kick-starts a Bengali American family’s healing.

Five years after his teenage daughter’s untimely death, middle-aged anthropology professor Shantanu Das finds a box in his attic. The box is full of notes passed between his late daughter, Keya, and her high school girlfriend, Pamela, along with a play they wrote together. Although Shantanu has tried to bury the shame of his homophobic reaction to Keya’s coming out, he’s haunted by the fact that he didn’t reconcile with her before her death. After he tells his other daughter, Mitali, about the play, her new boyfriend suggests they stage it. Despite an initial bout of reluctance, Shantanu gets on board, but Mitali and Keya’s newly remarried mother, Chaitali, wants to leave the past in the past…and then there’s the question of what Pamela thinks. This debut novel from Deb, a writer at the New York Times who has previously published a memoir, is a modest, readable effort that barely scratches the surface of its dark, complex premise. The novel is enjoyably stuffed with specific detail pulled from the author’s own life—he grew up in the Bengali community in the New Jersey town where the story takes place and draws on his experience reporting on New York City’s culture scene when writing about Broadway—but the characters remain stiff and two-dimensional. Though their explanations of their own feelings make sense, Deb has trouble conveying those feelings on a visceral level. Their grief is particularly difficult to access since Keya, despite being the novel’s title character, remains a vague presence. And it’s frustrating to read a novel about a young queer woman who died prematurely told primarily from the perspectives of straight people.

A story about grief that never fully comes to life.