[This appreciation of Kiran Desai’s new novel is not intended to be a spoiler, so you can read it safely unless you don’t want to know anything about it.]

If I don’t set down a few words now, quickly, I will risk taking notes for as long as the author took to write it! For Kiran Desai’s new novel (her first since 2006), is like the world, a never-ending, ever-extending, web of multifarious stories. The feelings it arouses in me are personal and political, feelings that make me nod in assent, want to write my own versions of them, feelings that tear me between three generations. For, like Desai, I am also a 1.5-generation immigrant, having come to the United States as a teenager, half a generation older than Sonia and half a generation younger than her mama, Seher. Like Sonia and Sunny, like so many members of the South Asian and the postcolonial diasporas, I too have shuttled back and forth on similar paths across the same continents—in their cases Delhi-Vermont-New York-Allahabad-Delhi-Landour-Goa-Mexico and back again, with an interlude in Italy in-between, and ghosts of Germany floating, lost, in the Himalayan mists. Like Desai’s protagonists, I too have been beset by the consciousness of unearned privilege, of being a “cheating outsider” (as the man with the longest fingernails in the world called Sunny), but also, of being, like Salman Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, “a container of worlds.”

There are so many different pieces all stitched into this patchwork of a novel, that nonetheless follows the fateful stories of Sonia and of Sunny as they crisscross continents both separately and together. There are almost-stand-alone set pieces, dreamy reveries and haunting nightmares, notes and sketches that might have been written in coffee shops over the years, post-colonial peregrinations, self-reflexive musings on how these ever-expanding drafts could possibly be made into something that would cohere. And just before a prosaic passage threatens to get a little tedious, Desai sweeps the reader into lyrical, utterly beautiful language that one wants to stretch out and bathe in.

She need not have worried—The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Loneliness) does cohere. It is a pleasure to read this third novel from a mature writer at the height of her powers and confident in her own style and voice. It employs magical realism without grandiosity. It luxuriates in language without tipping over into solipsism or farce. After a bit of a slow start, it grew on me—and grew, and grew, into 21 parts, 75 chapters, 670 pages. And when, all of a sudden, it was over, I was left wondering what had become, what would become of these people whose fates I had come to care about. And found myself starting over, in hopes of finding out.

Despite its length, the core of Loneliness, so viscerally real that it tied a knot in this reader’s stomach, plays out in the first quarter of the novel. It describes a relationship of coercive control that embeds itself deep and malignantly into one of our protagonists and haunts them both for the rest of the novel. What will it take to exorcise it?

Like her writer-mother, Kiran Desai brilliantly conveys a sense of place. Just the title of the section set in Vermont, “Winter Vast and Forlorn,” conjures up the desolation of the landscape, both inner and outer. At times, as in some scenes in Mexico and Goa, she risks overdoing the descriptions, and in those cases I found myself skating over the passage. But much more often I took great pleasure in them, letting them carry me away. For people whom history and politics have displaced, precious places must be conjured, claimed, and revisited in imagination, again and again.

But beware! In this novel, one must remain alert at all times, for the characters are at risk of being carried away for good. The sea that can rock you, lull you to sleep in its balmy waves, can also drag you down in a riptide that comes without warning. What will it take to get across? The sea is a living presence in Loneliness, putting me in mind of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and of Woolf’s acute awareness that we are all waves, thinking of ourselves as separate until we become one with the sea.

The sea contains all our stories. One thinks of the Kathasaritsagara, the ocean of the streams of story (often invoked by Rushdie, notably in Haroun and the Sea of Stories). In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai has woven a multiplicity of stories together into a web too large for any single person to contain, and has disappeared into them.

Part 1 is entitled, “Lonely? Lonely?” These words are spoken in utter bewilderment by Sonia’s grandparents when her father tells them that Sonia is lonely and depressed. For “they had no patience with loneliness. . . they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown.” But over the course of the novel and in different characters, we become intimate with loneliness as both a life sentence and a gift.

To carry us through and across these vast expanses of loneliness, we feel the need for a talisman. Pervading Loneliness is the figure of a particular talisman that must never be parted with, and that, if lost, must be recovered at all costs—although, as the novel so powerfully shows, the greatest loss of all is the loss of ourselves.

I can’t close without saying something about Kiran Desai’s mother Anita Desai, one of my very favorite writers. Anita is continually evoked in the distant, reclusive, beloved figure of Seher, Sonia’s mother (Anita’s German mother transformed into the Seher’s German father), but also in the mountain mists swirling around Cloud Cottage in Landour, Uttarakhand, so reminiscent of the setting of Anita Desai’s 1977 novel Fire on the Mountain. In her words of acceptance in 2006 upon being awarded the Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai said, “To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine.” In 2008 I wrote a paper for a conference on the strong similarities and the critical differences between the mother’s Fire on the Mountain and the daughter’s The Inheritance of Loss. Re-reading it yesterday, it still rang true. In Inheritance, the female protagonist Sai was an orphan. In Loneliness, both Sonia’s parents are very much present. Desai dedicated this new book to her late father, after whose death she asked herself, “why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?” I recognize those feelings now, with the death in India last week of my Manda-atya, my father’s youngest sister and the last of his siblings. Without her there, why should I go back?

Thank you, Kiran Desai, for finishing this novel at last, and sending it out into the world. It was worth waiting for.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents