Having lived in Dhaka for the last 10 months, recently on my way back to the US, I was casting about for a book to read on the plane. I wanted to keep it light but Harry Potter was sold out in Dhaka’s two posh but pathetic bookstores: etc. and word n’ pages (don’t get me started in lack of books and bookstores in Dhaka). Finally I took up Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, feeling a bit silly (come on aren’t all these novels written about people like us, leaving home, making a new home, coming back home, not knowing which one’s the “real” home, feeling at home everywhere and nowhere and so on?). But it won the Booker, who knows, it could be profound, it could be wise, it will pass the time since I can’t sleep on planes. That Ms. Desai is a capable writer I already knew. I had read her first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard some years back. It was cleverly written and though the plot went haywire towards the end, I thought maybe a witty jester had finally popped out of the diaspora factory instead of the usual navel gazer/agonizer.

There certainly was a lot of hullabaloo about the Inheritance:

India Today raved:

“A delightfully original book…A triumph of the storyteller’s art…luminous.”

NYT opined:

“…the best kind of post-9/11 novel.”

Alas, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Ms. Desai writes so firmly within the tradition of the female novelist of South Asian leanings residing in London, New York, or both, (I’ll unfairly lump them together: Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Arundhuti Roy (granted lives in India), Anita Desai, Zadie Smith) writing a bit about home and a bit about the “also” home that I felt like I had read it all too many times before. Maybe it was because a chunk of the novel was set in New York City, specifically, Morningside Heights, a neighborhood that I know reasonably well. To those who know the place, Grey’s Papaya and Grant’s Tomb make appearances. More likely it was because Ms. Desai used the tried and true mix, syrupy love (between a wealthy retired judge’s granddaughter and her lower middle class Gorkha physics tutor), bubbling up in the backdrop of rising social and political discord (agitation for Gorkhaland in Darjeeling). She then added together some immigrant angst (the family cook’s son Biju leads a subterranean life as an onion cutter/dish washer in NYC), a regrettable past (the judge as a village boy who travels to England for his Cambridge degree, faces subtle and devastating racism/alienation and upon his return takes out his self loathing on an infantile wife), as well as an unsettling present (the Gorkhas are usurping the enclaves of the rich expats out living their adventurous lives at the foothills of the Himalayas. A doddering and lovable Swiss neighbor, Father Booty, gets deported for residing illegally in India though he thought of himself as an “Indian” foreigner). All this is topped off with an uncertain future (What is the heroine to do? Alas as her world crumbles she realizes she must leave to make her own life. Biju comes back home, robbed penniless by the rebels, but to a loving father).

Perhaps I am being too harsh. Inheritance of Loss is a good read, there are some nicely turned sentences, engaging imagery (although note to writers of South Asian origin please shelve descriptions of the monsoon and the bazaar, enough said), a moment of Bengali pride (Bengalis are smart because they eat lots of fish), but don’t pick it up looking for a novel perspective on the immigrant life or even life in general. Chances are you already know what Ms. Desai is trying to say.