A friend I trust urged me to read Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, so I dropped my murder mystery to do so. The first pages dazzled me: Desai's words came like drops of brilliant paint, each landing in precisely the right place so that pictures emerged in slideshow succession. "Other stalls offered yak hair, untidy and rough as the hair of demons, and sacks of miniature dried shrimp with oversized whiskers; there were smuggled foreign goods from Nepal, perfumes, jean jackets, electronics; there were kukri sickles, sheets of plastic rainproofing, and false teeth...The cook remembered yaks carrying over two hundred pounds of salt and, balanced on the top, rosy babies stuffed in cooking pots, chewing on squares of dried churbi cheese."
Rosy babies stuffed in cooking pots! Desai shuttled me between India and America, her catalogues of sensation deft as Walt Whitman's. But I kept waiting for the pull, the sense of deepening character and suspense that would make me eager to return. It didn't kick in. The novel seemed a richly textured, nuanced, insightful book that should accompany a course on the immigrant experience--not a great read.
Had my literary British mysteries revved my need for plot, left me breathless and lazy? Desai's skills aren't limited to the empirical. She writes of one buoyantly opportunistic immigrant: "He relished the whole game, the way the country flexed its wits and rewarded him; he charmed it, cajoled it, cheated it, felt great tenderness and loyalty toward it." And of another, more bitter than buoyant: "Achootan didn't want a green card in the same way as Saeed did. He wanted it in the way of revenge.... Everyone wanted it whether you liked it or you hated it. The more you hated it sometimes, the more you wanted it. This they didn't understand."
Relationships to countries come across hard and strong; it's relationships between characters that didn't capture me. Somehow the pets had more resonance; people's connections to them feel far more vivid than the romances and tangled familial bonds. The dog, Mutt, is scared of storms: "She sought refuge behind the curtains, under the beds. But either her behind was left vulnerable, or her nose, and she was frightened by the wind making ghost sounds in the empty soda bottles: whoo hoooo hooo. 'Don't be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog, it's just rain.' She tried to smile, but her tail kept folding under and her eyes were those of a soldier in war, finished with caring for silly myths of courage." That, and the way the cat responds to petting ("Mustafa's bones seemed to be dissolving under Sai's stroking, and he twirled on her knees in a trance, eyes closed, a mystic knowing neither one religion nor another, neither one country nor another, just this feeling") feel somehow more profound than the human loves and betrayals.
"So did you finish The Inheritance of Loss?" Anne emailed eagerly. "What did you think?" Gulping, I told her honestly what I thought, apologizing every other sentence. Desai had, I was well aware, won the Man Booker Prize, and no doubt my craving for suspense and psychoanalysis was old-fashioned and lowbrow. I waited with trepidation for her reply, which would no doubt politely show me what I'd missed.
"I thought the same thing," Anne wrote. And suddenly I felt silly, for being so snobbish I'd begrudged myself an honest reaction.
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
