Immigrant Identity Crisis

Kiran Desai's highly anticipated new work doesn't quite cohere.

- SANJENA SATHIAN

LONG NOVELS DEMAND respect. Entering a bookstore and picking up a 600-page literary novel, many readers will make an instinctive calculation: This must be serious. No author would spill so much ink without having something essential to say. A reader's expectations may rise further if the writer were, say, a hermetic celebrity who has not published a book for 19 years—and higher still if that famous novelist were writing about writing, staking her claim on the form of the novel itself.

In this instance, the writer is Kiran Desai, the novel is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and the page count is 688. Booker longlisted already, it's the followup to Desai's 2006 Booker-winning superhit The Inheritance of Loss. And it is a big swing. Set primarily in India and the United States between 1996 and 2002, and told in an omniscient third person that nods to the 19th-century Russian novel, it combines various traditions of realism: It's part marriage plot, part trauma plot, and part novel of manners. Most ambitiously, it's a book concerned with Indian identity that levels a metacommentary on the very act of writing about identity. Desai's protagonists—Sunny, a reporter, and Sonia, an aspiring novelist—are isolated cosmopolitan writers. By choosing as protagonists two people writing about loneliness and identity—perennial themes in immigrant fiction—Desai aims to make well-trodden terrain her own.