I know – it’s Tuesday.
There’s a book shop in Terminal B at Laguardia that always seems to have interesting books on display. This is not normally the case for book displays at airports (which I always check out, assuming I have the time). On a trip to New York a few months back I had enough time to note a few of the books (and authors) I’d never heard of, and ordered them from the library. One of them was Western Lane, by Chetna Maroo.
The protagonist of Western Lane is Gopi, the eleven year old daughter of Indian immigrants who loses her mother to cancer. Gopi has two older sisters, a father who’s been completely flattened by the loss of his wife, and an aunt who is doing her best to manage the unmoored family from a distance. The father copes with his wife’s loss by training his daughters to be squash players (at a club called Western Lane), and Gopi turns out to be quite good – so good in fact, that she is able to compete at a regional championship.
As you might expect from a novel about a young girl losing her mother, Western Lane was painful to read, but it was also surprising and quite beautiful. The characters kept defying my expectations of them. Not in the sense that they acted better than I thought they might, just that they didn’t follow any formulaic expectation of what grieving and loss looks like, while still remaining deeply human. Perhaps this was in part because it was the story of a family of Indian immigrants to the U.K., and a sub-theme was the family’s adjustment to a new set of cultural norms. The author points at this when it comes to the father’s interest in a white woman, the aunt’s interest in adopting Gopi, and the father’s unexpected responses over the course of the novel.
I found Western Lane a powerful, short novel that has stayed with me longer than most.
Just Because I Liked It:
- Jerry Seinfeld recently gave the commencement address at Duke University. It’s funny and clever, and worth the watch. What you don’t see in the video is that just preceding his speech, there was a walk-out by pro-Palestinian protesters because of Seinfeld’s pro-Israel support.
- While I’ve seen the name Fareed Zakaria, I’ve never heard him speak, nor did I know anything about him. As he’s on CNN, I just assumed he was another talking head. So, I was pleasantly surprised by how thoughtful, curious and learned he is on this episode of Conversations with Tyler.
- It’s not just that Sam Harris is a sane and thoughtful voice about what’s going on in the world today, but I often find he gives clarity to the muddle that I find around us. Here’s his take on antisemitism, and what’s going on on college campuses.