An American Marriage + Milk Teeth + Lost Children Archive

So when I read the news that Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage had won the Women’s prize for fiction, I thought I’d pop over here and send out a quick little edition of the newsletter to celebrate this very deserving win (especially since the last one was so delayed). Only to discover that I’d flat out forgotten to send out the aforementioned last one, which has, it turns out, been sitting in Drafts.

Oops.

Never mind my dimness. The point is An American Marriage is a gem of a book and the fact that Milkman did not win the Women’s prize has partially restored my faith in the ineffable awesomeness of the universe. This year’s shortlist — The Silence of the Girls, Circe, Ordinary People, My Sister the Serial Killer, Milkman and An American Marriage — was a strong one, but An American Marriage can very validly claim to be the first among equals.

Even though it's about marriage, an institution that’s so familiar to most of us that it feels everyday, what sets An American Marriage apart is that it looks at all the usual trials — estrangement, infidelity, envy etc — but with one significant twist in the tale. Celestial and Roy's marriage has to grapple with racism and the American justice system.

Roy and Celestial have been married for a year when he’s wrongly accused and found guilty of rape. He is sentenced to 12 years in prison and this is when An American Marriage offers up a classic, heartbreaking love story. The two write letters to each other and these are among the most beautiful sections in the novel. They’re intimate and revealing, especially when the two start drifting away from each other as Roy sees Celestial moving on with her life while he's trapped in another world. Seven years into the sentence, Roy’s verdict is overturned and he is released. He’s coming home, in the hope that he and Celestial will be able to rebuild their relationship. He doesn’t know that for the past three years, Celestial has been in a relationship with her childhood friend Andre.

Folded into this story of shape-shifting love, injustice and the trauma are explorations into happiness, the importance of the father figure, motherhood, the expectations of fidelity, and so many observations about American life and society. An American Marriage is a love story, a genre that’s conventionally considered ‘girly’. Only love in An American Marriage is such a difficult, broken but precious thing. It also has one of the most acutely observed portraits of masculinity, which is worth pointing out because too many people still think women can’t write male characters.

Every detail in An American Marriage is carefully-imagined. Like, for instance, Celestial’s profession. She makes handmade dolls and it’s obvious that these artificial babies are Celestial’s way of dealing with the guilt she feels for not wanting a child. But there’s also the observation that Andre makes about the dolls — they all look like Roy. While Roy is in prison (where he ends up meeting his biological father), Celestial becomes a successful artist. The doll that brings Celestial fame is one that is dressed in prison blues — a baby that’s destined to end up in jail simply because of skin colour.

If you’re in the mood for fiction, do pick up An American Marriage. At the risk of being a bit spoilery, let me entice you with a detail that few works of literary fiction can profess to have, but An American Marriage does: a happy ending.

Here beginneth the newsletter that I thought I'd sent out, but actually hadn't. Sigh.

Beautifully rooted in Mumbai’s terrain is Milk Teeth by Amrita Mahale. Ira Kamat is a young reporter who covers the civic beat for a newspaper and lives in a dilapidated building in Matunga that is being eyed by developers. Her marriage has been arranged to Kartik, her long-time crush, who grew up with her in the same building. Unsettling this neat arrangement is Kaiz, Ira’s ex-boyfriend, whose paths re-cross with Ira’s just when she’s agreed to marry Kartik.

The novel is bookended with emotional violence. It opens with one of the residents of Ira and Kartik’s building being threatened by a stranger (everyone figures he’s a thug sent by the developer) and it closes with Ira’s family being subjected to threats and malice. The first incident frightens the victim, but fosters a sense of community as other residents rally around. By the time the book ends, it’s hard to find a silver lining to the emotional violence (maybe the sense of individuality and independence it gives Ira even while isolating her and her family?). In between these two threats, Ira’s heart is pulled in different directions.

It may sound like a simple love triangle, but Milk Teeth is more about Ira and Kartik coming to terms with themselves, rather than the tricksy business of love. Almost everyone in Milk Teeth felt familiar to me, like someone I’ve known or a version of a person I was in the past. Parallel to the people is the city of Mumbai, its bones being broken and rebuilt; its surfaces being made shinier, glassier and more metallic by the appetite for ‘development’. Mahale does such a wonderful job of bringing an almost-vintage Bombay to life that it won’t matter whether or not you lived in the city in those years. Her words draw you into it, forging a sense of belonging.

I did have a few quibbles with Milk Teeth though. One was that while I fell headlong in love with Ira, neither Kartik nor Kaiz felt even half as charismatic. From the way Ira uses English – her language made me properly nostalgic for that bygone time when we used English a little more formally than is the convention now – to how she soldiers through what the men in her life put her through, this woman is everything you want in a heroine (particularly one who feels so much like an embodiment of the city). The men, on the other hand, are just annoying because their gloss quickly turns out to be dross. The more I saw of them, the more I wanted Ira to get the hell away from them. Maybe that’s just me being curmudgeonly, but I think the final twists of Milk Teeth would have been served better by heroes who felt worthy of Ira. That said, the preponderance of disappointing men certain does feel realistic.

Another stumbling block for me was Mahale’s decision to first shift to Kartik’s perspective almost three-quarters into the book and then write a first person narrator. I’m not sure why these shifts were necessary but they made the book feel a little unbalanced since most of the novel is from Ira's perspective. But like I said, these are just quibbles. For the most part, Milk Teeth is a charm.

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That ability to pull the reader into a place that is imaginary but feels physically real was one of the things I loved about Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli. Cross-country journeys are an important part of Americana and you’d be right in thinking Lost Children Archive, with its collection of journeys, is as American as it gets. But for the tiny detail that Luiselli is Mexican by birth, grew up all around the world by virtue of her father being a diplomat, and now lives in America (in the Bronx, no less). So does that make her novel American? Technically, no. And yet, with its hipster parents, precocious kids, immigrant anxieties, unending landscapes and weird small towns, Lost Children Archive is only credible because it's set in America. Anywhere else in the world, it would feel like fiction.

Lost Children Archive is like going through an old journal, filled as it is with the experiences of a quiet family that’s falling apart in silence. Luiselli has said that the idea of writing it came from seeing how her daughter make sense of the migration crisis that has seen more than 10,000 immigrant children, separated from parents and family, being held in custody. This is the second book Luiselli has written on this subject. If you feel ready to feel like an emotional wreck, read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 questions, in which Luiselli documents the experiences of children who cross into America from Mexico. It is the stuff of nightmares and you will desperately wish it to be fiction. It's not.

Three trails run through Lost Children Archive, which notionally starts off with a young woman becoming grimly obsessed with finding out what has happened to two little girls who have crossed the border into America illegally. One journey is the road trip that the young woman takes with her family — her partner, his son and her daughter. Her partner is looking to retrace his way to Apacheria, fascinated by the almost-erased history of Geronimo and the Apache people. Along the way, the children go on a journey of their own, in the hope of reuniting their family, which is clearly but silently falling apart. A third journey is in a book titled Elegies within the novel. Elegies is about a set of lost children whose traumatic experiences are coded into allegory, fiction and poetry (it’s like a nightmare version of the underground railroad).

For much of the novel, the family travels, listens to news about child refugees, makes stops at non-descript towns, and then moves on to the next phase of the journey. She reads haunting, terrible passages from Elegies. Her partner holds a microphone in the air and records the sounds around them. The children play their games. It shouldn’t feel dramatic, but it does. With every milestone they cross, you feel the tension build.

At one point, Luiselli shifts to the son’s perspective, offering first a recap of sorts and then pushing forward with the story. I have no idea why she wanted to do this because Luiselli as a little boy is an awkward, unconvincing voice (relatively speaking). I wouldn’t be surprised if some found her grown-up woman voice a little too self-consciously poetic to feel entirely credible. While there are brief moments when she feels a little artificial, Luiselli’s language is just so beautiful that I can forgive her everything. Here’s a sample:

“Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to take a picture of, or how to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short.”

(Of course the boy is not taking photographs on an iPhone. He’s using a Polaroid camera. I did say they were hipsters.)

Lost Children Archive is full of little triumphs. Like, for instance, sustaining the length of a full-length novel without actually naming any of the main characters. Or that Elegies is actually tapestry of inherited memories of wounds and pain that Luiselli creates by weaving into her writing passages from existing works of literature like Heart of Darkness, The Waste Land, and The Gates of Paradise (which was written in English, translated into Spanish and then Luiselli took that translation and retranslated it back to English. How’s that for a journey through words and meanings?).

If you’re curious about Luiselli, this profile is nice.

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Elephant in the room: this newsletter is late.

I confess, if it wasn’t for the internet, I probably wouldn’t have got round to sending anything out because I’m furiously writing other things. (All of it nonsense, but we plod on in hope that getting crap out of the system will eventually yield something … not crap. Sigh)

But you're reading this because I've been goaded into writing the newsletter by the internet. First, thanks to Kat's Kable — an excellent compilation of longform articles — I ended up reading Andy Matuschak's theory that non-fiction books need to evolve if they're going to live up to their reputation of being educational. In case you're expecting Matuschak to suggest exactly how this can be done, prepare for disappointment. He doesn't know, but he does have ideas and questions that he'd like you to think about.

I'm still mulling over a lot of what is in that essay, but one thing that did strike me is that a book isn't quite as static a medium as Matuschak implies. From the way we write to what the pages look like and how language changes, the book is actually responding to the times in which it is being written and read. As far as learning from a book goes, I do think Matuschak's point that most of us don't retain all the information we read in a book, but it's worth keeping in mind that in the larger scheme of things, we haven't been readers for very long. If you think about it, most human cultures transmitted information through song and art, which may well be why we're so drawn to video 'content' today. Whether it's an Instagram story or a YouTube video, the audio-visual quality actually ties it to ye olde styles of infotainment which were performed live and used elements like storytelling and drama to teach an audience.

And then I read this essay, on how a lot of us are making an exhibition of how much we read. "Some people cannot see the books for the stack; ‘How do you read so much?’, they enquire with varying degrees of politeness," Andy Miller grumbles in this essay. "The thing that drives me crazy about social media – about life, in fact – is the presumption of bad faith where none exists," he writes.

I must admit, all that Miller's essay made me feel was a trickle of shame because here I am, saying I have a books newsletter, but do I send it even half as regularly as I should? No. Clearly, I’m not doing very well with the performative aspect of reading, which also means my chances of being booed at a lit fest are low (we’ll ignore the detail that even lower are my chances of being at a lit fest in the first place).

Miller spends a lot of time discussing the performance that’s expected of readers in the social media age (and the kind of reactions these performances can evoke). He ends the essay with a description of his average day, in which he manages to squeeze in approximately five hours of reading. That is a LOT of reading (she said, trying to contain her envy and admiration). I wish he’d written more about how this habit of reading has developed because I think most of us go through phases of reading and not reading. I know I do. There have been weeks when I haven’t touched a book and all I’ve read is the prose that I can’t avoid because work demands I look at it.

I’m going through a not-reading phase now. I’ll read a couple of pages and put away even books I'm enjoying. The anthology Magical Women has been sacrificed at that altar of distraction. It’s a slim little volume and you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to get through it. Not because the short stories in it are bad. Well, some of them are admittedly pretty turgid, but there are a few good ones in there. Even though all of the writers seem to be enormously self-conscious about delivering a feminist message, this doesn’t bog down all the stories. I loved Gandaberunda by SV Sujatha, which involves voices in the head, a tattoo that I desperately want to see now and a certain amount of unapologetic violence. Tridevi Turbulence by Trisha Das was fun too and I properly applauded the rakshasi of The Rakshashi’s Rose Garden by Sukanya Venkatraghavan (who has also edited the volume) for coming up with perhaps the most eco-sensitive response to misogyny and sexual predators.

In the past, I’d feel terrible during these phases because really, what is the point even if I can’t call myself a reader? The more I think about it now, I hope reading never becomes a chore for me. I hope I’ll always feel that little fizz of excitement and expectation that I feel when I pick up a book that I’ve been looking forward to read. I hope reading never becomes something I do without thinking, without savouring.

Because when I do find the book that brings me back to reading, it’ll feel like a homecoming.

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Thanks for reading.