The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. By Kiran Desai. Hogarth. 670 pp. $32
Have patience, Rilke once advised, and try to love the questions. This brave approach to living is central to “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” Kiran Desai’s first novel since 2006, when she released her Booker Prize winner, “The Inheritance of Loss.” Her marvelous new novel, a finalist for this year’s prize, is as much question as it is narrative – an exploration of the way perspective alters perception, of the way reality itself may become malleable, shaped by dreams, stories and fears.
Dickensian in spirit and vaster even in scope, this lavish story doesn’t open with the titular characters but with their grandparents, tracing through generations the ways in which destinies are created through primal, often intangible, forces.
Dadaji and Ba are worried about their granddaughter, Sonia, a creative-writing student at a snowbound college in Vermont. Sonia is afflicted by chronic loneliness and weeps through their phone calls. But they can’t quite fathom her unhappiness: The idea of loneliness in America has a different flavor from the loneliness of the crowded, servant-filled spaces back home in Delhi. Isolated on a campus emptied for winter break, Sonia falls under the spell of a fame-obsessed, eccentric painter named Ilan de Toorjen Foss. Desperate for human connection, she becomes caught in his shimmering undertow.
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Meanwhile, Dadaji recalls that his old chess partner, the Colonel, happens to have an unmarried grandson, Sunny, living in New York City. The older generations put forth a matchmaking proposal, but Sunny already has an American girlfriend, and Sonia is secretly entangled with Ilan. Fate, however, is not so easily deferred. Betrayed by her lover, Sonia returns to India. She is on a train, reading, when Sunny – who is there to help his best friend, Satya, find a bride – walks by and attempts to make out the title of her book. The frisson between them is subtle, almost mystical.
Desai is masterful at excavating the layers of motivation beneath action, demonstrating how things are often not as they seem, how the forces of history repeat, oceanic and inescapable, affecting individuals in ways that evade their own awareness. When Sonia writes a story about a boy who becomes a monkey, Ilan considers it a kind of self-stereotyping, which he labels with his own stereotype. “This is the Great Indian Rope Trick,” he tells her. “What Westerners did to you, you are doing to yourself.”
The narrative is punctuated with nuanced, frequently devastating insights into the knottiness of race and representation, the legacy of orientalism, and the complexities of interracial and intercultural relationships. At one point, Sunny’s White American girlfriend catches him eavesdropping on a phone call, and Desai writes: “Why was it that in the Western world, snooping to uncover a crime was a worse crime than the actual crime! Ulla’s civilization was built upon not snooping and wandering about naked. Sunny’s civilization was based on donning your clothes and listening to every conversation.”
The authorial voice is both incisive and witty, splicing serious observation with humor, as in Sunny’s deconstruction of the idea of Italian “charm”:
“A train that is late and breaks down in a charming way is Italian. A train that breaks down in a not-charming way is Indian.
“Laziness in India is infuriating and equals animosity. In Italy it indicates an enjoyment of life’s pleasures.
“Candlelight in a trattoria is romance. In India it equals power failure and a testing of romance.”
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” depicts love as an act of questing and discovery, a struggle to re-create the self by creating a third joint-self; the vulnerability this requires is its own act of bravery. The question becomes whether people can get out of their own ways. Sonia is left traumatized in the aftermath of her terrible affair with the painter, while Sunny is drained by his controlling mother and corrupt family. These presences shift around Sonia and Sunny like parts of a grand theater, each of them affected by forces as vast as the legacy of war, the subjugation of women, the devastation of White colonialism and India’s subsequent self-subordination.
Equally vast is the novel’s emotional and sensory world, detailed with animals, plants, food, clothing, gems and art, as well as continual allusions to water – clouds, vapor, pools, rain, rivers and ocean. Wisps of magic churn at its edges, suspending the story between dreams and reality: A ghost hound menaces the lovers, then vanishes; a talisman confers uncertain powers; spells are cast and broken. Even the beautiful prose has a touch of the mystical about it. Cement urns bear “soufflés of snow,” Dadaji’s house contains “long, thin, prayerful doors,” a character recollects “slow purring bees.”
The meditations on the uses and nature of art are especially ardent. An artist’s paintings of bottles are “solemn, austere, and moral,” Desai writes. “They were the opposite of money and war, of time tearing ahead without concern. How could so much be conveyed by an empty bottle; how could an empty bottle be the keeper of one’s conscience?”
India is ever-present in these descriptions and characters, majestic, broken and uncontainable. As its mirror, the novel is both journey and immersion, expansive, leisurely, wondrous. It unfurls in its own time, creating not only a world but a universe.
Eventually the novel circles one central question, posed by two adversaries:
“Why do we try to solve other problems? There is only one that is necessary to solve.”
“Loneliness?”
“The other problems would melt away in importance.”
More question than answer, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is as much about the making of art and love as it is a love story, as much a reflection as a creation. This novel floats upon itself, a gazing eye, a voice, a thought, a magnificent vision.
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Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of “Birds of Paradise,” “Origin” and the culinary memoir “Life Without a Recipe.” Her most recent book is “Fencing With the King.”