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June 7, 2009

Love in the Time of Diaspora

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

THE PRAYER ROOM

By Shanthi Sekaran

382 pp. MacAdam/Cage. $25

By now, you recognize the Indian novel. Every week, it seems, there are new additions to the subcontinent’s thriving subgenre of immigrant literature, all of them sharing a few tell-tale elements: lush language; the vitality and musicality of India’s crowded gullies; its ancient spirituality counterpoised against a crass new materialism; its émigrés’ struggles to balance tradition and modernity.

Shanthi Sekaran’s first novel, “The Prayer Room,” contains all of these familiar and sumptuous treats, all the multicultural exotica we have come to expect. But it does not contain — and perhaps doesn’t need to contain — much more.

The tale is this: In 1974, George Armitage, a young Ph.D. student from England, ventures to Madras to work on a dissertation about Indian temples. He does less research and more flirting than he expected, and ends up returning to England “on a Pan Am airliner with his new small wife beside him.”

He has, we are told, a history of regretting his purchases.

George’s new wife is an Indian named Viji, from a traditional family. They have married at the insistence of her mother, who was devastated to learn of Viji’s white lover at a time when even dinner dates were carefully arranged. Now Viji sets off, as so many Indians did in that era, to make a life with George in the West — first in England, then in suburban Sacramento.

George is a frustrated intellectual; Viji is lonely and ill equipped for a bewildering new land. It’s not a promising foundation for romance, and the trouble only deepens when George’s lecherous, tactless father crosses the Atlantic to move in. What emerges is a chronicle of lukewarm love: love that is initially coerced, then becomes a pleasant habit after triplets are born, then sputters into boredom and resentment as time wears on, driving Viji to walk out and leading both of them toward infidelity before their love finally, if tepidly, returns.

The story is simple. But, as with so many novels of the Indian diaspora, the plot matters less than the language.

Sekaran is a master of cadence, and as she displays her intimate knowledge of India, England and America, there’s jazz on nearly every page: the “first striated fumes” of a cigar evoking a British pub, Sacramento’s longing “to be a city other than itself,” a sing-song Indian accent that betrays “affection for the syllables themselves.” In India, a phone booth “keeled into the sari shop, which butted against the sweet shop, which rammed into the grungy teahouse, which crashed into the tailor’s.”

Such observations shine a bright light on the cultural collisions at the heart of this novel. Yet we slowly realize that the book is little more than the sum of its beautiful details. Sekaran’s sentences may be loose gems, but she hasn’t strung them together to make jewelry. While she treats us to descriptions of a “possibly malnourished” lizard and a “small bikini that dripped gray puddles onto the linoleum,” she never convincingly tells us what it’s like for Viji to bear the children of a man who doesn’t love her, or how she reaches the decision to leave George, or what her impressions of America are. Nor does Sekaran compensate for this lack of interior life with a corresponding exterior gaze — we don’t learn who is president at the time, what is happening in the society, what George’s academic interests are.

To be sure, “The Prayer Room” has its pleasures. But because it remains more interested in the colorful cross-cultural manifestations of human motivation than it does in human motivation itself, it goes down like a five-course repast of gelato. No individual bite is unappetizing. But nothing collects; and at the end you fold your napkin with the faint feeling that you have been satisfied but not filled.

Anand Giridharadas, a columnist for The International Herald Tribune, is writing a nonfiction book about modern India.