Anna Leach
posted 3 May 2007

The chief judge of this year’s Orange prize, Muriel Gray, launched the prize’s long-list with a controversial speech about how contemporary female writers were failing to write imaginatively. Instead, she claims, they were churning out ‘thinly veiled’ autobiography about the dead babies and broken relationships in their Middle England lives. ‘There were lots of books we rejected – about personal female issues, the loss of a child, the break-up of a marriage, thinly veiled autobiographical things of no consequence – because they weren’t expansive enough’.

Kiran Desai’s 324-page novel cannot be accused of shying away from ‘expansive’ issues.The Inheritance of Loss, set mostly in India, partly in New York and partly in England, encompasses colonialism, a revolution, multi-ethnic nationhood and illegal immigration in the US. But while Muriel Gray may be focusing on the ‘issue-scape’ of Desai’s book, it is not the feature of the novel that is emphasised by her publishers. Marketed on the front cover as – ‘Affecting and endearing, full of laughter and tears’ –The Inheritance of Loss comes across as more of a traditional female novel.

If Desai is caught in any box, it is one that has been constructed by her own publisher. The marketing convention that women’s writing has to be likeable and about crying fits only superficially with Desai’s book. The novel I read was a nihilistic, bitter book where characters and readers are caught out by their pleasures and hopes and thrust into sticky sordid muddles. This sort of publicity material puts women’s literature back into an old clichéd place that Muriel Gray is campaigning to take it out of. Sure, people laugh and people cry in the book but it is often more interesting when people don’t cry; for example, like the abused wife who withdraws into emotional vegetablism.

The marketing kitsch-up continues in the official publicity release, where The Inheritance of Loss is described as ‘a radiant, funny and moving family saga… described by reviewers as “the best, sweetest, most delightful novel”’. Yes, there are various families involved, but there was little that was sweet or delightful about marital rape, racism and street massacres.

But it is neither the ‘big issues’ vaunted by Gray, nor the ‘family saga’ side to this novel that make it what it is; rather the fraught boundary line between the two: where political allegiance impacts on love affairs, and where the reality of life in a grubby New York basement reshapes the American Dream. The neglect, disappointment and accidental cruelty exposed by the novel’s exploration of dying colonialism and the exploitation of the third-world, bleed into the lives of the characters. Desai uses rich, mannered, even cutesy language to delineate a bleak universe.

One of the most powerful threads in the narrative is a tale of domestic abuse. A standard of kitchen-sink stories and almost certainly one of Muriel Gray’s ‘personal female issues’ but here a story that resonates with the larger international issues, including the exploitative relationship Britain exercised over a subservient India. The narrator points up this implication, describing the couple’s mutually destructive union:

they had tapped into a limitless bitterness carrying them beyond the parameters of what any individual is normally capable of feeling. …. Experienced rage with enough muscle in it for entire nations coupled in hate.’ (p173)

Ostensibly the main characters are the two Indian youths: Sai, an Anglicised, independent-minded teenager living with her cranky grandfather, and Biju, son of Sai’s cook who has made it to America and works exploited and illegal in New York. Sai’s grandfather, usually referred to as ‘the judge’, is a dislikeable retired member of the judiciary, and the husband in the abusive marriage mentioned above.

Remote, twisted and Cambridge-educated, the judge’s presence distorts the lives of those around him. Inset into the stories of Sai and Biju runs the story of the judge’s own youth and marriage. A good student, he is sent off to Cambridge University, where he is misunderstood, ignored and casually humiliated. He returns, having not spoken to anyone for three years, acutely isolated with a hygiene hang-up. ‘His new ideas of privacy were unfathomable’ (p.167) Baffled and disgusted by his Indian wife, he rapes her in a violent, gruesomely-described sex scene, is then revolted by the whole thing and orders the servants to wipe the whole house down with Dettol. From then on he ignores her, hits her and, on one occasion, thrusts her head down the toilet:’

One day he found footprints on the toilet seat – she was squatting on it, she was squatting on it! – he could barely contain his outrage, took her head and pushed it into the toilet bowl, and after a point, Nimi, made invalid by her misery, grew very dull, began to fall asleep in heliographic sunshine and wake in the middle of the night. (p173)

His quest for purity takes a perverse lodging in hatred: ‘the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before…. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating.’ (p161) This is the sordid mess a failed man ends up in.

It is not just the parallels with international relations that make an interesting tale out of this perennial ‘female issue’. It is told from the point of view of the man. And having seen this man as a victim of humiliating, character-deforming racism and isolation in 1930s Cambridge, we can’t fully wrest our sympathy away from him.

His abuse of his wife replicates, tellingly, the off-hand scorn and occasional malice he experiences in England. In titling her book The Inheritance of Loss, Desai emphasises ideas of inheritance and transmission. Loss, like abuse, can transmitted from person to person or society to society. It is not an excuse but it is a complicated moral picture. A picture that Desai wafts in lightly and passes over quickly, just as we pass over the wife, Nimi – invalid and invisible.

The story of the judge’s failures, disappointments is mirrored in the story of Biju who sets off to New York to make his fortune in the land of plenty, with the high hopes of his father riding on his shoulders. Scorned, isolated, bored and scared, his life is a miserable chain of illegal jobs in cheap restaurants. The book ends in a cruelly bathetic climax. Sordid, muddled and bereaved, the characters gather to console, betray, or hit each other with slippers. Couching these harsh narratives is a rich, sensual language, revelling in details and lists to the point where the writing almost has a sticky feel to it, becoming cloying and humid at points.

The novel is rife with the sort of messy common details that disgust the judge. The two teenage lovers, Gyan and Sai, ‘would have melted into each other like pats of butter’ (p129). The judge has been powdering his face before he forces himself on his wife, and is described as ‘Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment’ (p169). Food comes up a lot in the narrative: dumplings, chutney, dahl, beef-burgers (‘the blood beaded on the surface’ p136). Returning from a trip out, Sai throws up: ‘a mordant bile rose up in her throat, frizzling her system, burning her mouth, corroding her teeth – she could feel them turn to chalk as they were attacked by a resurgence of the chilli chicken.’ (p215)’

There is as much that is intentionally nauseating in this conversational style of Rushdiean excess as there is anything ‘endearing’. I have to confess I found this quite a sordid bitter book; this richness leaves a queasy feeling, making for a nihilistic poverty beneath the wealth of language and the fertile detail.