NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME

Fiction

Butt the proctologist

NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME

By Rakesh Satyal

418 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

A subtle bias has crept into publishing in the past few years: a predilection for stories from writers of exotic backgrounds, whether skillfully written or not. Yes, most of us readers want to be taken “lands away,” as Emily Dickinson has it; we want to read about lives different from our own humdrum. Yet most of us want to be taken there by a competent guide.

No One Can Pronounce My Name is exotic enough. Rakesh Satyal is of Indian descent (his bios fail to reveal when his family immigrated to America) and is gay. His first novel, Blue Boy, winner of the 2009 Lambda Award for Gay Debut Fiction, mirrors his own boyhood growing up in Cincinnati.

This current novel delves into the society and culture of immigrants from India living in this country. For women – to hear Satyal tell it – their interchange is about gossip, judgment, back-biting and competition regarding their cooking ability and the relative successes of their husbands and children (especially sons). For men, it is about ruling their families, pressuring their sons to excel, and discussing who has the most prestigious car, house, job, refrigerator, and so forth. Their attitude is this:

“Poor Raneshwar…it is so humiliating that Sateja (Raneshwar’s wife) has to work all those hours. And she missed Avnish’s Ganesh puja the other night.” Never mind that Sateja Datta is a neurosurgeon who was operating successfully on an eleven-year-old’s brain instead of going to the party.

For children, life is difficult. One of the protagonists, Prashant, has given up his first choice of college and enrolled at Princeton, bowing to his parents’ demand that he remain closer to home. But in an unlikely display of independence he has set rules: phone calls from them only once a week; visits once a semester.

There is color and exoticism aplenty in this character-driven story. Sari-clad women, dozens of bangles on their arms, pride themselves in entertaining friends and family, cooking mountains of samosas, pakoras, aloo gobi, matter panreer, masala – I got hungry reading it.

There is also subtle comedy. Ranjana works as a receptionist for an Indian proctologist who has anglicized his name to “Butt.” The tragedy on which the book initially turns is the death of Swati, a daughter.  When the cause is revealed, it takes a while to absorb the black humor of it: Swati is killed by a Barbie doll. 

But Satyal makes it hard for us by introducing his characters randomly and at different stages in time. He makes it hard for himself, too – harder to keep consistency in play. I for one can’t believe that tall, lean Frederick morphs with time into chubby, cutesy Teddy. It’s also unbelievable when Harit’s catatonic, mourning mother rejuvenates.

Ranjana writes in secret, telling her husband she is compiling a recipe collection for their son – although they both know Prashant will never cook for himself. She also belongs to a writing group, all of whom seem to specialize in vampires, mermaids, and zombies. Clearly Satyal has belonged to such writing groups: As Ranjana reads, “They smiled sweetly at her, all of them too absorbed in their own work to care what Ranjana had to give them…she wondered if it were even necessary to have villains in her stories. There were enough enemies sitting right here.” After skewering writing groups, Satyal does the same for writers’ conferences and arrogant agents.

Although he isn’t writing about zombies or vampires (except when producing a sample story for Ranjana), Satyal’s style is very much in the writing-group vein. He explains things that he should leave to his readers to figure out, as “Mohanji…seemed genuinely happy for his wife, not at all threatened by her success.” And it’s enervating to follow his lunges for “good writing” similes and metaphors. Like this: 

…her elbows were like ripe walnuts, the folds of her armpits smooth as a baby’s mouth.

Or: 

Her feet, covered with the hoarfrost of age… (The woman in question is probably no more than fifty.)

Or:

The words ‘problem set’ seemed to dangle in front of Juliana like a pile of wet garbage.

Or:

She felt as if she had, until now, been covered with feathers and was finally molting off their fluffy weight.

And if a writer uses foreign words, couldn’t we have a little glossary in the back? Not all of us speak Hindi; it’s lucky Wikipedia knows what a salwar looks like.

Despite its flaws, this book is memorable. Like a good sitcom, it leaves its characters satisfyingly paired off, or at least working their way toward equilibrium. For Ranjana, it concludes happily, if implausibly. Sorry to say – this is the problem when plots jump from time to time and character to character – I can’t remember what happens to Prashant.

It’s pronounced “Pruh-shahnth,” by the way.

Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.