The Roommate + Klara and the Sun

May you never be short of distractions

Usually when I see there’s a new subscriber to this newsletter and they have a name that sounds South Asian, I assume this person has written a book that has just come out or will come out soon. That’s usually when most people experience a peak in their interest in how books are written about and covered in various media. However, I’m not sure this explains the recent spurt in subscribers to this newsletter. Mostly because that would mean 2020 was a super productive year for all of you — in case that’s true, congratulations! (she said through gritted teeth while struggling to write a sentence, let alone a whole book) — and that around the world, the publishing industry has gone on a spree of signing on new novelists. (The last part seems about as likely as India vaccinating the bulk of its population by December 2021, but never mind me.)

I’m guessing some of you found me because I’m one of the mentors of Write Beyond Borders and the rest of you have been rabbit-holing through the internet. Either way, hello and may the force be with you. For those who signed up in the dead of the night while impulse buying glittery nail polish or trying to lull themselves to sleep, this thing here is a monthly(-ish) newsletter in which I ramble about some of the books I’ve read in the past month. In case you’re wondering who I am, I’m the author of one thriller, two children’s books and one biography. I’ve also been a journalist for a little more than a decade, writing about society and culture, and generally bursting blood vessels while trying to process the state of many nations including my own. (If you’re feeling an urge to buy any of my books, please don’t resist. I recommend Hush A Bye Baby, a book about a scary gynaecologist, and the Puchku books, about an adorable kid and her two friends. Let it not be said I don’t have range.) 

In the past couple of months, it’s felt like the planet is in a peculiar, partial eclipse with half of it shadowed in despair while the other half catches the light.  We got news of successful vaccination drives in countries like America and the United Kingdom. People put up photos of picnics and holidays. In Iceland, people played ball while behind them, a volcano did its thing (the floor was very literally lava and it’s one of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring sights I’ve ever seen in photos). Meanwhile, Israel unleashed a brutal attack on Palestine, in which approximately 1,900 Palestinians have been injured and more than 200 Palestinians have been killed (Israel has suffered 13 casualties). In May, India recorded the highest number of Covid cases and deaths that the world has known since the start of the pandemic last year. We’re far from processing any of what we’re surviving right now, be it the guilty rage of a survivor or the collective grief of countries with rising counts of the dead.

Reading and writing in times like these can be difficult. I know I’ve struggled since last year and it’s felt significantly harder this year to finish or even start a book. This is ironic because the only way to power through times as horrible as the ones we’re in is by finding opportunities to retreat and regroup. Books, films, shows, video games and even online shopping offer precisely that. These distractions give us both perspective upon the real world (should we choose to see it) as well as a break from the reality that feels oppressive. We tend to look down on the idea of being distracted, but there’s a lot to be said for shifting your attention and effectively rebooting your mind. Especially when real-life cruelties are unrelenting, we need these escapes. The curious power of stories as they unfold through either words or images, lies in how they seem to temper our anxious souls, helping us feel emotions, but in a way that doesn’t seem as overwhelming as reality. Contained within a narrative, between the covers of a book, and confined within the dimensions of a page or screen, most things feel more manageable.

After all this, you’re probably expecting me to recommend some transcendental poetry or an almost impenetrably elegant novel, but no. Because the first book that I’ve read, understood and finished without a hiccup in forever is a romance: Rosie Danan’s The Roommate. It took me a little more than a day to finish and every moment spent on it was an absolute delight.

The Roommate is about a woman who falls in love with a porn star. She’s a socialite who needs to get away from her overbearing family; he’s the breakout star of adult films. He doesn’t try to change her. She doesn’t try to change him. They fall in love, work towards making porn a less exploitative industry, and also find the time to engage in some steamy romance. You’d never guess this is Danan’s debut novel and she does an excellent job of using familiar tropes in a way that doesn’t feel tired or overused. For instance, even though Josh, her hero, is a far cry from the conventional suited-booted banker or prince of the traditional romance, Danan does stick to the time-tested formula of pairing an ingenue woman with a sexually-experienced man. I really appreciated how Danan made sure there was no sense of shame surrounding Josh and his profession. He isn’t coy about being an adult performer and he demands respect for the work he does. While I doubt The Roommate will make anyone think adult films might be a good career option, Danan does do a creditable job of nudging her readers to be non-judgemental. Plus, she crafts a clever power balance between the couple by making her heroine Clara the one with the financial and social capital in the relationship. Clara starts off as someone who has whimsically quit a job and is afraid of being a failure. By the end of the book, she’s an entrepreneur, which is as wholesome an arc as you can ask for in a female protagonist.

The fact that we have a porn star as a hero is a great example of how romance as a genre is both responsive to its readership and progressive. While most genres, including literary fiction, tend to be stuck in their ways, romances have proved to be impressively versatile, particularly in recent years. Readers of romance will tell you that romance has always been a radical genre even though it has rarely got the respect it deserves. Here’s a genre that is (for the most part) written for women and by women, and places the heroine and her feelings at its centre. Especially since globally our cultures tend to valorise men and manly exploits, the fact that romance as a genre has thrived is a noteworthy triumph for the feminine. From the improper ladies in Jane Austen’s novels to contemporary heroines who don’t want to get married or defy beauty conventions, romances have consistently walked the tightrope between upholding social norms and defying them with subtlety. There have also been dramatic changes in terms of how protagonists look, the professions they valorise and the social attitudes championed in the novels. We now have heroines who are plus-sized, of colour, grappling with mental health issues and so on — they’re imperfect women, and a far cry from heroines of the previous generations who were all white, delicate and fragile (but pushing boundaries in their own ways. For instance, modern paperback romances celebrated working women by making them heroines and demanded professions like nursing and secretarial jobs are given respect). Meanwhile, today’s heroes take a battering ram to toxic masculinity by showing a man can be manly and confident without being domineering, patriarchal and rapey. On top of all this, reading a good romance leaves you feeling like this:

What’s not to love?

Thanks to the restorative powers of The Roommate, I picked up a book I’d bought when it first came out — Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel prize a few years ago, thus dashing the hopes and dreams of all the literary critics who have been finessing their essays on Haruki Murakami in the hope that he is named for the literature Nobel. As someone put it when Ishiguro’s name was announced, “Bastards picked the wrong Japanese name.”

Ishiguro, of course, is more British than he is Japanese, especially in his writing, although my favourite Ishiguro novel is An Artist of the Floating World, which is set in post-World War II Japan and looks at the choices made by an ageing painter in the course of his life. Ishiguro is perhaps most famous for his third novel, The Remains of the Day, about the life of a butler. It’s about as stolidly English as a novel can get. Among the Ishiguro works that are lost to us is a radio play he wrote early in his career, about two cross-eyed people who fall in love and don’t acknowledge they’re cross-eyed. It was a tragic love story that ended with a dream that involved a cross-eyed dog, if I remember correctly. I should point out that the BBC rejected this proposal. So yes, it turns out you can write exquisitely beautiful books, but also regrettable radio plays about cross-eyed people.  

Klara and the Sun isn’t the best example of Ishiguro’s storytelling even though it starts powerfully. Klara is an AF, or artificial friend — solar-powered robots that look like children and are designed to be companions to kids. When we meet her for the first time, she’s in a store with other AFs. Klara is not the latest model, but she stands out because she’s curious, observant and sensitive to the feelings of both humans and other AFs. She notices when a fellow AF is distracted or bored. She can tell when someone is tentative or nervous. She also has free will, which we see for the first time when she ignores commands issued to her to ensure she’s not bought by a particular family.   

The sections in the shop are by far the most powerful parts of Klara and the Sun. The shop, with its kindly manager, feels like an updated version of a benevolent Victorian orphanage with the AFs dreaming of being bought by families, instead of orphans hoping to be adopted. We see the futuristic world that is outside the shop window through Klara’s perspective, and it’s a charming combination of innocence and curiosity. We also realise that the sun is a god-like entity to Klara and presumably all AFs though none of them seem quite as taken by the sun as her.

Ultimately, Klara is chosen by a little girl named Jodie who lives with her mother and is sickly because she’s been “lifted”. We’re never told exactly what goes into this lifting process, but the hints are that there’s some sort of genetic modification that is done to children to enhance their abilities. However, before they become enhanced, their bodies struggle with the changes and some even die in the process. Initially, it seems as though Jodie’s mother agreed to buy Klara so that Jodie would have a companion, but we later realise that — SPOILER. SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF SUCH THINGS BOTHER YOU — the older woman bought the AF thinking that if Jodie doesn’t survive the lifting process, her mother will make Klara ‘become’ Jodie.

Klara, however, decides she can save Jodie’s life by effectively making an offering to the sun. Much of Klara and the Sun is about Klara figuring out ways to carry out her mission without any of the humans around her figuring out what she’s doing.

Obviously, there are a lot of interesting ideas nestled in the plot of Klara and the Sun but frustratingly, Ishiguro is determined to avoid all tension and conflict while taking the most boring approach through the events in his story. To some extent, he’s hamstrung by his decision to use Klara as his first-person narrator. While Klara does have feelings, there’s an equanimity about her that makes her placid, which in turn means the novel feels placid too. The first-person narrator also means that we can only see and hear what is accessible and of interest to Klara. So, for instance, present-day Jodie is the only one that matters to Klara while for us readers, it would be much more interesting to know how things have changed for Jodie since she got lifted.

In the future that Ishiguro imagines there is no clash between AI and humans. AI are built to serve and they accept that as their purpose. The AFs in Klara and the Sun reminded me of the android in the Black Mirror episode titled “Be Right Back” (starring Domhnall Gleeson), especially when Klara (of her own volition) retreats into a closet-like space. Actually, Gleeson the robot made me feel a lot more conflicted than Klara does because in “Be Right Back”, the tension lies in the way Gleeson can be confused for the human he’s impersonating. I never mistook Klara for anything other than a robot in the course of the novel because no one (not even Jodie) sees Klara as anything other than a device. Add to that Klara’s single-minded dedication to be of service, and you have a character that’s been reduced to a dehumanised, passive existence. It’s only right at the end that there was any kind of melancholy.

What I also found unconvincing was Klara’s naivete regarding the sun, which was at odds with her perceptive reading of people’s emotions. Klara can figure out when a person is pretending but she also believes the sun sleeps in a shed after it sets. This is a robot designed to mind children and yet she hasn’t been programmed to know the basics, like what happens when day turns into night. Given our obsession with educational toys, it seems ridiculous that the AF would not be programmed with some general knowledge. Not just that, two humans — one an adult and the other, a young adult — help Klara with the ritual that Klara thinks will appease the sun. Ishiguro doesn’t make even the laziest effort to explain why these two people wouldn’t try to find out why Klara is doing the odd things that she does (including vandalising a machine).  

Also, the whole ritual that Klara performs to save Jodie’s life is quite obviously supposed to offer a parallel to the practices of nature-worshipping religions. However, if you read the stories of those old mythologies, they feel complex and offer insights into how cultures attempted to create a relationship with nature. Klara’s worship of the sun is facile and uninformed. It’s almost as though Ishiguro believes that neither children nor AI — the two products of human ingenuity — are capable of anything other than subservience and primitive thought. This is particularly mystifying as a point of view when you keep in mind Ishiguro is a parent himself.   

So that’s all I have for you this time. Before leaving, let me share with you a few lines from Ross Gay’s poem, “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude”:

“Thank you the quiet

in which the river bends around the elephant’s

solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating

on its gentle back

the flock of geese flying overhead.

...

and you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.

I know I can be long-winded sometimes.

I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude

over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward… .”

Hang tight, dear reader. I hope the world lavishes upon you every possible kindness and keeps you and your loved ones safe. And may you never find yourself short of distractions.

Take care and Dear Reader will be back soon.