MEN LIKE OURS, by Bindu Bansinath
It’s hard to see clearly, and write honestly, about the places you’ve left behind. It requires a cold heart, even in fiction. You’re going to blow up certain bridges you’ve crossed. This is why some writers are better after their parents have died.
Philip Roth took a lot of grief, for example, after the publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” for depicting Jews in suburban New Jersey in ways they thought lent credence to old stereotypes: overbearing mothers, emasculated fathers, guilt-ridden sexuality. He was declared to be “bad for the Jews.”
V.S. Naipaul was touchy about coming from Trinidad and, in his fiction and nonfiction, frequently expressed contempt for his homeland. He especially disliked what he called its unlettered, uncreative society of “mimic men.” He was loathed in return. Along similar lines, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan have been ticketed for stock negative portraits of Asian men in their fiction.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Bindu Bansinath’s bold and darkly comic first novel, “Men Like Ours,” kicks up a Roth-like fuss, or at least a semblance of one, in the suburban New Jersey enclaves known collectively as Little India, in Middlesex County, N.J., where this novel is set and near where Bansinath was born.
These places (Edison, Iselin, Woodbridge) are dense with immigrant strivers. The long string of exceptional South Asian restaurants that line Oak Tree Road, a hectic commercial strip, are the best, it’s been argued, outside of Delhi.
In many respects, “Men Like Ours” is a love letter to this area, and to the pluck and tenacity of a generation of South Asian women who were smart but poor and brought to America in arranged marriages. Bansinath sometimes narrates in the first-person plural, as Jeffrey Eugenides notably did in “The Virgin Suicides.”
We arrived at the homes of men like ours in the late ’80s and ’90s. Men like ours were last resorts, garden-variety men; if our small dowries hadn’t undermined us, they would have stayed bachelors forever. We came to them from faraway cities and forgot the shapes and bustle of our hometowns. The specifics of our histories didn’t matter here. The degrees that we earned elsewhere fell to the wayside. … We needed to know only how to set their tea, how to boil ourselves down into plain white rice.
The collective voice underlines the shared experience and the propinquity on display, even though the novel focuses primarily on a single Indian American family, the Sharmas. The mother, Anita, thin and beautiful, a “snob” with an unusable degree in software engineering, was brought over at 21 to marry a dull older man, the lowly employed Ashok, who spends his free time insulting Pat Sajak while watching “Wheel of Fortune.”
Their teenage daughter, Leila, straddles two cultures. She aspires to become an actress or a writer, but she’s caught in a miasma of dark impulses. She’s referred to as charmless, mannerless, poorly groomed and (on this book’s index of characters) “a tart.” She begins to be leched after (and worse) by an ostensibly married older man, a worldly friend of the family’s named Matthew Pillai, who takes her to third-rate French restaurants and the theater (“Chicago”), and for overnights in Manhattan.
He attends to her not because she’s pretty. He attends to her because, as he puts it, “You have no self-regard.” Leila is happy at first for the attention.
When Matthew turns up dead in the front seat of his BMW, the women of Willow Road, as they are collectively known, take a sharp interest. Charmed by his British accent, they’d befriended Matthew as well. The police gather the women’s testimony. It’s “part gossip and part fact, inconsistent as a stream of old frying oil.”
This novel is often painfully funny. Anita and Ashok bicker like Estelle and Frank (“Serenity now!”) Costanza — they’re loud, boisterous, irrational, nagging. “Kill me off,” Anita replies when Leila complains about her cheap clothes. “I’ll die,” Ashok says. “That will make you feel better?” If these men and women were gunfighters, bits of plaster would fall from the ceiling and onto their heads with every shot.
Anita frequently descants on other people’s adipose tissue. (“She could do with a SlimFast.”) She declines an invitation, lying: “My prolapse. Things will fall out.” Sometimes the novel made me laugh out loud. Anita to Leila: “I threw away your damn Sephora makeup. See who will have sex with you now.”
The narrative moves in fits and starts. The choppy timeline pings quickly around between the decades, and it’s easy to become disoriented. I was sometimes tempted to rearrange this material in strict chronological order: The impact might be even stronger. “Men Like Ours” is less a car than a pile of gleaming engine parts.
The reason the novel matters, and why it announces Bansinath, who is a staff writer for New York magazine’s The Cut, as a genuine and offbeat talent, is that she’s a great noticer, even if the thing noticed is merely the glory of, let’s say, a turkey hoagie from Wawa. But she’s especially attuned to disorder and rot and chaos. Like the writers Ottessa Moshfegh and Tony Tulathimutte, she is dialed in to the aesthetics of disgust.
Who was it who said kids cry a lot because they’re always looking at the undersides of things, up into hairy nostrils and the gum and grime under the dinner table? This novel has a similar perspective on its characters — a youthful horror of gross, looming, munching, shedding oldies.
You can skip the next two paragraphs if you’re still having breakfast. The men and women in “Men Like Ours” chew with their mouths open, pick Dorito dust from their fingernails and are flatulent at the table. There is vomiting, soaked armpits, spitting and burping, and thinning female hair. Muumuus are stained with toothpaste, and teeth from betel leaves; carpenter ants walk across tables. Houses reek of mildew.
Anita wipes “the smell of feet cheese from her forehead.” Leila has cystic pimples. There is blood on the seat of the jeans she wears at school. Anita cracks that an uncle will explode “mole by mole.” The entire township “smelled dead and ripe.” Even the flowers “resembled white blood clots and reeked of tart semen.” Nearly every page has a similarly pungent observation. She calls up as many of these details as any reader can handle.
These descriptions are visceral and almost Rabelasian; no varicose vein or freezer-burn encrustation will go unclocked. They reflect Leila’s existential nausea, in sync with a line from one of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels: “New Jersey’s is the purest loneliness of all.”
As a budding artist, Leila is aware that her people are good material. She begins to record her family’s conversations. “Exploited unhappiness was worthwhile unhappiness,” she thinks. She refers to her scribblings, the stained tablecloth of her imagination, as “a notebook of exaggerations,” but when Anita finds and reads it, she weeps.
Witness is love, goes the old cliché. Yet as Francine Prose once put it, wonderfully, “People don’t necessarily want to be around someone on whom nothing is wasted.”
MEN LIKE OURS | By Bindu Bansinath | Bloomsbury | 361 pp. | $28.99
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
The post The Women of New Jersey’s Little India Have a Story to Tell appeared first on New York Times.
