All This Could Be Different
“We all have our truth of a place. There is no universal narrative of any city that is also real. Only marketing.” This is very true and this line was a great takeaway for me that I’ve tucked away to use elsewhere. I would say the same sentiment applies to books.
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews is a 2022 National Book Award finalist. There’s a lot to like in this novel that follows Sneha, who immigrated to the US from India with her family, and her (often thwarted) attempts at “adulting.” I don’t mean “adulting” in a haha humorous way; Sneha is tenuously working as a consultant on a contract basis while toeing the line to maintain her visa. She’s a closeted (to her parents, who were deported back to India) lesbian. Her “chosen family” of friends provides the impetus to explore ideas of community, housing, politics. So, yes, there’s your setting for a novel about “growing up” amidst the 2008 recession, discrimination, and a hidden family history. Yet, yet, yet. Something about this novel felt overwrought, simplistic, cloying — not to mention very much like a 20-years-later version of Rent — despite its reflection of reality. Maybe my response was preordained: Sneha’s very “Karen”-esque neighbor is named Amy after all. (😫😰)
A review in the Los Angeles Review of Books likens Mathews’ debut to Jane Austen, reasoning that both employ a “panoramic view of mingled desires, fears, and joys.” This is spot on, and honestly, I’m not a huge Austen fan, so there you go. But I found this comparison interesting. Is it the reliance on dialogue? The focus on outward actions instead of interiority? (Although both authors certainly give readers a glimpse into characters’ inner lives.) The use of money and property to uncover characters’ motivations and fears?
Everyone knows the first line of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” I think Jane Austen is known for these types of quotable declarations. So, in Austenian fashion: “We all have our truth of a [book]. There is no universal narrative of any [book] that is also real. Only marketing.”
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