Art and friendship, tainted by some ugly business

This compulsively readable short novel forces us to take a good long look at our dormant friendships

- Aditya Mani Jha

For a novel so steeped in old-school ideas about art and friendship, Annie Zaidi's The Comeback is quite sharp when it comes to depicting a decidedly contemporary phenomenon—the passive-aggressive Instagram spiral. When you really, really want one particular person to listen these days, you scream your lungs out in front of millions. I have done it myself and, to paraphrase poet Allen Ginsberg, I have seen the best minds of my generation naked and hysterical in their worship of the online blood-God.

Rising Bollywood star John K, the narrator-protagonist of The Comeback, has just found out that his estranged friend Asghar has returned to their shared first love: theatre. Desperate to get into Asghar's good books and his troupe again, John starts shooting increasingly elaborate Instagram videos of himself performing classic stage monologues—the Brutus speech from Julius Caesar on a hilltop, Portia's "quality of mercy" speech next to the Statue of Liberty, and so on. This sequence rings especially true because this is precisely how millennials, a generation raised on virtual "connections," would approach conflict resolution in real time.