NEBRASKA, by Monica Datta
Forget the meek. Let the annotators — history’s reply guys, trolls of the margins, keepers of the last word — inherit the earth.
At the very least, it can be worthwhile to hear them out. Such is the case with “Nebraska,” Monica Datta’s electrifying new novel, which relates the tragedy of the Chatterjee family by way of a Bengali psychoanalyst named B.X. Roy, who has a taste for prodigious footnotes and compares himself to “a magpie with depth perception.”
Another type of narrator (a vulture?) might cast Anna Chatterjee as a monster. The facts are indeed ghastly: She killed her youngest child by pushing his wheelchair in front of a train barreling toward Grand Central Station. But Roy gilds the story with a stupendous amount of detail, relying on purloined diaries and his own research to explore every internal and global force that might have led Anna to the platform. The result is a dizzying, occasionally nausea-inducing masterwork that defies categorization or prurient interest.
Prabir, Anna’s husband, meets their adult children, Nina and Neal, on what they believe is her parole date, after a yearslong incarceration. But when they arrive at the prison, Anna is long gone, and her jailers won’t reveal anything about the circumstances of her departure.
Aside from Roy and the Chatterjees, the novel’s other significant character is Jean-Louis Katz (yet another psychoanalyst!), who treated Neal in Paris, befriended Nina in Canada and, crucially, was aboard the train that killed their brother, an event that became the lodestar of his career. These relationships, and his professional training, allowed him to understand the family dynamic with diorama-like precision. Roy knew Katz in passing, and discovered his personal effects, containing a mine of Chatterjee observations, in an auction of unclaimed packages. None of this is a spoiler. The revelations in this story come from the deepest trenches of the id.
Any reader so far tempted by “Nebraska” should ask: Am I ready to submit to a narrative that abjures all traditional trail markers?
Roy ignores chronology, delays catharsis, bounds off in directions that most editors might gently term “the weeds.” Just as a therapy session rarely proceeds in an orderly fashion, information in “Nebraska” arrives when it is irrepressible, with chapters that leap between decades, continents and perspectives.
After the opening scene, it’s challenging to keep track of where various characters are at a given point in history. But the story of Rabi Chatterjee, a loving boy with cerebral palsy and an I.Q. of 25, and his death at age 8, begins with his mother in Kolkata.
Anna grew up humbly, with parents who tolerated her, and encountered Prabir by way of a personal ad placed by his family that promised “CASTE NO BAR.” Prabir was living in England at the time, working as an Oxford-educated chemistry lecturer with a gruff Scottish brogue. Anna would join him there once her visa was secured, and after her new family had ground her into a wifely paste.
This asymmetry and emotional remove defined their entire marriage. A particular ironclad logic governed every decision the Chatterjees made, every criticism they’d hurl or absorb, including after they moved to the United States. Recounting Anna and Prabir’s betrothal, Roy mentions “the most auspicious wedding dates of the month,” the Shubh Vivah Muharat. “If you don’t understand why Prabir could not be married the month after, you don’t understand.”
Readers are fortunate to have Roy, himself a product of the subcontinent, interpreting this heap of history. “Sometimes modern persons at conferences, almost always American, will say that they wish for something like representation in their books. I did not because the Indians in books written by Westerners were ridiculous,” he notes in a stellar aside. “This is why we all love Wodehouse, who has scarcely mentioned us.”
If you don’t understand what makes that remark so deadly, you don’t understand.
It’s useful, narratively speaking, for Roy to be so frank about his low estimation of the imperial project. The upheaval of Partition, the long tail of racial stereotype in Britain, the fundamental incompatibility that many immigrant families find in new homes — these forces, Roy implies, are just as much to blame for Rabi’s death as Anna’s maternal despair.
For as easily as Anna was cast as a heartless Medea — in the words of one New York prosecutor, “We welcomed her into our country, and she repaid us with her son, on the tracks” — her actions more closely resemble an expression of twisted love than of unadulterated evil.
The novel’s structure, a child’s death doubly filtered through the sieves of two psychoanalysts, allows for a compassionate and dignifying window onto Anna, even in her most unhinged moments. Not every reader will be sympathetic to this stance, but I found it persuasive, partly because of Datta’s tremendous control of emotional terrain. (It’s worth noting in light of the novel’s ingenious engineering that Datta, whose previous novel was the equally intriguing “Thieving Sun,” also works as an architectural designer.)
The flashes of insight about her characters are brilliant, and frightening. Neal’s very specific phobia, hinted at early in the book, blooms into a pitch-perfect, absurd chapter that could stand on its own as an artist’s coming-of-age story about what to do when your dearest friends are getting sick of your antics. Nina’s career as an architect could be the grist of countless therapeutic sessions about why she devoted herself to designing pleasant environments for lives she’ll never lead. They were teenagers when Rabi was killed, and never fully reckoned with his death.
Still, the depictions of grief in “Nebraska” border on the transcendent.
Prabir, mourning his cremated child: “His son was distilled now in water and air. Everything that lived had something of him in it.”
Anna, thinking of her family on the day she killed Rabi: “The lie of omission — of omitting herself — would be her only gift to them.”
Roy, though, has the final say on the Chatterjees, superseding the impressions of Katz, lawyers, witnesses, neighbors. Alternately tendentious, illuminating and droll, his commentary lifts the story from the stuff of drippy family dramas and police blotters to the sublime.
True, Roy has his prejudices. Rabi is yet another example in his mind of colonial plunder, as contested as an Elgin marble, and he considers Katz a well-intentioned buffoon. But this magpie orientation — expansive enough to find inlets to the multi-hyphenate writer Rabindranath Tagore, the connection between Bengali vegetarians and neoliberalism, a Swedish butter scandal and countless other riffs — makes clear that the story is irreducible. “Nebraska” is not merely a novel of a murder, maladapted immigrants, the limits of the American justice system or the loneliness of marriage. It is all of that, and more.
What to make of the book’s title? Anna’s location may be a mystery to her family, but readers know from the first pages that she has been taken in by a reverend and his wife, who sponsored her release and brought her to live with them outside Omaha. She’s essentially indentured there, and is undiscoverable after adopting their last name. It is her latest domestic confinement in a lifetime of them. Yet she’s also repeating a classic American story: Arrive, atone, rebuild. If she can find a measure of freedom, she might at last be the author of her own life.
NEBRASKA | By Monica Datta | Astra House | 465 pp. | $29.
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