The loneliness of Sonia and Sunny A novel

Review by Booklist Review

So lonely is Sonia at her Vermont college that she laps up the smallest crumbs of attention thrown her way by an older artist. Soon she has erased every sense of self in an abusive relationship, the long shadow of which will cast a pall for years. Over in New York, struggling journalist Sunny can't find his footing in his relationship with his white American girlfriend. Even from India, his mother loses no opportunity to smother him with her neediness, heavy baggage that Sunny can't easily handle. Sonia and Sunny only meet about a third of the way through the novel, by which time Desai (The Inheritance of Loss, 2005) has placed her pawns on the gameboard with ease. Secondary and equally engaging narratives featuring family and friends play out in parallel. Above all, the novel brilliantly portrays the steep costs of relationships that can erode the psyche. The story weaves in such weighty themes without ever devolving into crassness or weighing down the plot. Through difficult times, an adopted family deity, Badal Baba, gives Sonia something reassuringly elemental to take succor from. Rich with old-fashioned storytelling and populated with fully fleshed, nuanced characters, this is a stunner worth savoring.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Booker winner Desai returns 19 years after The Inheritance of Loss with an elegant bildungsroman of two Indian people and their convergence in the early 2000s U.S. The reader meets the pair before they meet each other, when they're unhappy with their current partners. Sunny, a journalist in New York City, navigates the contradictory feelings that come with dating an American woman and the challenge of reporting on one world while feeling suspended between two. Meanwhile, Sonia, a college student and aspiring novelist in Vermont, struggles to adapt to American life. She winds up in a relationship with Ilan de Toorjen Foss, an artist 30 years her senior, and moves with him to New York, where she hopes to feel less lonely. Instead, Ilan proves controlling and quickly isolates her. Eventually, Sunny and Sonia meet on a train. Their love story is affecting and enriched by Desai's forays into the lives of their family members in India, including Sunny's widowed and overbearing mother, who's stuck with her corrupt brothers-in-law and lives vicariously through her son; Sonia's mother, who leaves her husband to become a hermit in the jungle cottage that was once her German father's art studio; and many more. Desai's artful prose is subtle even when pitched on a grand scale ("There were no children in India anymore in the homes of successful parents of a successful class"). This ambitious yet intimate saga is well worth the wait. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa. Sonia's grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, "paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears." Shortly after Desai's magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont--loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?--and unaware that she is romantically involved with a much older, very famous painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel's grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny's family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family's kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted arranged marriage unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication ofThe Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can't stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, "these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?" Desai's trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia's head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny's lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel's central obsessions--love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own--and come to a perfectly satisfying close. A masterpiece. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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