THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY, by Kiran Desai
Almost 20 years in the making, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai, is not so much a novel as a marvel. In an era of hot takes and chilly optimized productivity, here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent — a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness — might take time.
Where to begin analyzing these close-to-700 pages, not one extraneous or boring? Maybe with the idea of celebrity, which peaked in the late 1990s, when the book is largely set, and preoccupies several of its characters. Is being known widely an antidote to modern alienation — or its ultimate realization? Desai might have grappled herself with this question, as winner of the 2006 Booker Prize for “The Inheritance of Loss”; this book is longlisted for the award (and if it’s not on the short list, to be announced Sept. 23, then the Bookerati have gone bonkers).
“In this world you are famous or you are nobody,” declares Ilan de Toorjen Foss, the arrogant, aristocratic painter who seduces Sonia Shah, 32 years his junior, from Delhi and prone to melancholy. “Happiness,” an inner voice repeatedly tells her, “is for other people.”
Sonia is a senior who works at the campus library at the fictional Hewitt College in Vermont (perhaps drawn from Bennington, where Desai studied; you can imagine Ilan, who learned the Highland fling at his Scottish boarding school and has family in Zurich, played by a middle-aged Max von Sydow).
Feeling “an almost unbearable, sublime tingle” reading “Anna Karenina,” she hopes to become such an author herself. “Ahhh — don’t write orientalist nonsense,” Ilan (the kind of jerk who underlines in library books) scoffs at her fledgling efforts. And: “Don’t write about arranged marriages.”
He goes full Pygmalion on Sonia: awakening her sexually, finding her a job with a glamorous but racist art gallerist in New York City, where he has an apartment, buying her beautiful clothes at Bergdorf Goodman, letting her move in and putting her in charge of the groceries and his brittle ego.
There are enough billowing red flags in this relationship for a Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation — pistachio shells and lentil soup pitched out the window, superstition, temperature sensitivity, germophobia, thievery, demeaning rages.
But Sonia, enraptured, remains as muse through Ilan’s first big success even as he proves to be a narcissistic abuser with major mommy issues. When their ménage comes to an abrupt if predictable ending, she accidentally leaves behind an amulet that had belonged to her late German grandfather, also a painter.
Oblivious to all of this, her parents in Delhi have been drifting apart as her mother discovers herself professionally, and her other grandfather has been scheming to betroth Sonia to the grandson of his chess partner, in part to settle a long-ago debt. Defying her villain’s edicts, Desai will be writing about arranged marriages, and even throw in a little magical realism, but in a thoroughly unpredictable way that ingeniously incorporates his celebrated canvases, and the way Sonia is portrayed in them.
The young man haphazardly intended for her is Sunny Bhatia, a copy editor on the night shift for The Associated Press who was drawn to America after reading about its eccentrics in J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut.
Sunny lives with some unease in the gentrified Fort Greene neighborhood, “this Brooklyn idyll of triumphant multiracial calm.” Unbeknown to his widowed, class-obsessed mother, he’s sharing an apartment with Ulla, the daughter of Republicans from Prairie Hill, Kan., who have issues of Consumer Reports by their recliner and five guns in the basement.
Shaky in his status as a “person of color” in a nation obsessed with “race, race, race,” he too weighs the price of fame, interviewing a railroad clerk who has grown fingernails long enough to get him into the Guinness Book of World Records. His subject’s outrage at the resultant story foreshadows a climactic confrontation to come.
One of the many miracles of Desai’s writing is the attention she gives to secondary and even minor characters — far too many to detail here, and not all animate. Beyond the “Upstairs, Downstairs” of 19th-century fiction, yet with comparable heft, she ventures into the floorboards, up into the trees and across time zones. (In a narrative coup, 9/11 is witnessed from Mexico.)
A divorced, wart-nosed aunt rubs her hairy legs together in bed, self-soothing. A chauffeur delays Sonia and Sunny’s first important date because he is collecting discarded plastic bags along the road. One even comes to feel affection for the Shah family car, “the Ambassador, its rotundity washed as lovingly as a buffalo.”
And the actual animals! The small squid clinging helplessly to a net in Venice during a tourist expedition; bandicoots ravaging the kitchen and even stealing soap; pigeons copulating on the air-conditioner — all stay in the imagination. Even the house cat and dog get a place in the family tree.
Crowded but never claustrophobic, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people. Feel the tingle.
THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY | By Kiran Desai | Hogarth | 688 pp. | $32
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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