Padma Viswanathan

Reviewers on this site and LibraryThing call this novel "informative," and say it's a look into the "psyche" of a Brahman family in India. It is said to be an "epic," which opens a "window" onto a world many readers won't know, "enriching" our experience and making us more sympathetic to "exotic" customs and ideas. The book, in other words, functions in two ways: it's a romantic epic of a family, and it tells us about rural Brahman life in India. It's both documentary and entertainment, both socially responsible and escapist.

Every once in a while there is a good reason to read a novel to learn about some unfamiliar part of the world. If I am intolerant, I can read something on the people I mistrust or dislike. If I need information that isn't available in nonfiction or documentaries, I might turn to a novel.

But that is not what makes novels worth reading, writing, or thinking about, despite the fact that a high percentage of the current production of novels, up to and including writers like Zadie Smith, are meant to be "informative" about some part of the world. A novel is a way of recording thought, and of wrestling with the relation between thought and language. It really does not matter what the novel is about. If the novel as a form is taken seriously enough, it does not matter if it has any "information" about the world: Viswanathan could have made up not only her characters but everything about Brahman life.

"The Toss of a Lemon" implies a certain history of the novel, which includes 19th century English novels, Forster, Mann, Maugham, and late Romantics. If this novel was the sum total of what the 20th and 21st centuries have achieved with novels, there would have been no modernism or postmodernism, only a continuing belated romanticism, hoping continuously for a return to an impossible past. What Viswanathan really wants is mid-20th century popular romanticism, combined with an ideal precolonial authenticity.

This is another book I read for the 2016 AWP meeting in Los Angeles.… (mais)