Alphabets, Epiphanies, and the Return of Voldemort: January in Books

January saw me leaning into what the internet book community calls ‘mood reading’: picking up titles with little-to-no prior planning, trusting instead an elusive instinct to lead me to the next read, and the next, and the next. In hindsight, I think I have always been a mood reader: unable to follow reading challenges, have coherent to-be-reads, or participate in book clubs for long. It is nice to now have a word for the condition. And here, dear reader, are the tangible proofs of it.

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn is a literal novel to boot – both, about letters and narrated in letters. The book opens with a letter written by the titular Ella to her cousin Tassie, informing her of a curious (and, as it turns out, momentous) turn-of-events in Nollopton, a city on the fictitious island of Nollopnia. The island, named after Nollop, a man who has since become the stuff of legend and attained god-like status since his creation of a pangram – “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” – that the island now reveres greatly. Through Ella’s letter, we learn that one the tile with the ‘Z’ in the pangram now engraved in the middle of the city as a monument, has fallen off and broken and the High Council, in a frenzy, has interpreted this as a sign from Nollop himself and proceeded to outlaw all use of the letter going forward. As the story progresses, more tiles fall off and more letters are outlawed, from ‘Q’ to ‘K’ to ‘J’, all the way to ‘D’, ‘L’, and ‘U’. Through correspondence between Ella, her cousin Tassie, their parents, and their friends, Ella Minnow Pea builds up a sense of doom recognizable to anyone familiar with how dystopian writing about authoritarian regimes goes. More literally, with every tile that falls off in the story, Dunn also knocks off the letter from usage at the novelistic level. Hence go any words that might use Z, D, K, or L; hence the appearance of alternates proposed by the Council. As it does so, the novel explores what the loss of an alphabet – and hence, words – means for both communication and consciousness, as either struggle to reorient themselves to what is a constantly-updating regime of more letters lost to the Council’s fanaticism. In a last bit of literalness, the only letters that remain are LMNOP – or, put another way, ones that allow the novel’s name to be what it is. 

As creative as the novel’s literary qualities are, they are unfortunately also what limit it. Dunn’s story leaves little room for contingency and/or disruption, as characters with any potential to do so are carted off and exiled from the island and hence, the narrative. Then there are the letters themselves. As more and more of the alphabet is outlawed, Ella Minnow Pea inadvertently pushes itself into a corner, narratively and stylistically, with the effect that its climax feels inevitable while also managing to undo most of what its dystopian build-up strives to do in the rest of the novel.

In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Daedalus, the titular artist and young man, goes from a young schoolboy to a student at Trinity College, and the reader is a witness to his consciousness as it takes shape over the years. The central tension, as the title suggests, is Stephen’s attempts to reconcile his aesthetic/artistic impulses with his reality of being a young man in 20^th century Ireland. Each of the novel’s chapters peek into Stephen’s head at different points in his life – each foray as incisive and precise as it is cavernous. There is a distinctly tactile quality to the novel: of every experience coming to the reader filtered through the bounds of Stephen’s knowledge of his world in ways that Joyce carries beyond the narrative into his style as well.  Portrait’s language, thus, changes as Stephen does, just as the plot’s (insofar as there is a plot) points of reference alter around Stephen’s encounters with his Irishness. The form of the novel sits seamlessly on top of its content, doing as much – if not more – to drive its point home. Portrait’s dreamlike meandering comes in waves, and while chapters do a lot to curate these, it is best to simply let these wash over you.

Published eight years after the Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth brings together stories familiar in content (and arguably, style) to her debut. Her protagonists are once again Bengalis living in America – typically the East Coast – and navigating identities and relationships against the backdrop of what is seemingly an acute cultural conflict between and/or reckoning with the hybrid Americanism and Bengali-ness. In the eponymous ‘Unaccustomed Earth’, Ruma and her father find ways to be their own selves and be with each other in the aftermath of Ruma’s mother’s death, while ‘Only Goodness’ follows Sudha and Rahul, siblings whose lives take highly divergent turns that widens and congeals the rift within the family. The latter half of the book contains a single story – ‘Hema and Kaushik’ – which follows the two protagonists in their lives, punctuated, even in their essential difference, by their ties with their families. Acquaintances who met as children, Hema and Kaushik are brought together years later during a summer in Rome, during which time they form a strong connection with each other.

Each of Unaccustomed Earth’s stories returns to a set of questions now very familiar for Lahiri’s readers. Arriving as I am to this collection after having read The Namesake and Lowland, the early iterations of tropes and character sketches Lahiri uses in these novels are hard to miss in Unaccustomed Earth. To that end, in my case, this collection suffers partly from poor timing: perhaps reading this chronologically would still ensure a streak to freshness to Lahiri’s explorations of diasporic identity. As it happens now, the directions that Unaccustomed Earth’s stories take feel all too rehearsed, within Lahiri’s literary practice yes, but more frustratingly within the structure of the book itself. As precise the stories are and as well-written and touching the characters are, they are also difficult to tell apart in terms of their motivations and desires across stories. Over and over again, arranged marriages fail or remain loveless arrangements of convenience, parents seem unable to talk to their children, generational burdens are passed on in stories that quickly become deeply familiar, failing to linger after they have ended.

Finally, a revisit: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling, the fourth in the series and until I started reading all of them again, my favourite of the seven. It is easy to see where Goblet of Fire gets its persona of being the first serious and/or “grown-up” installment: it does the groundwork for much of what is to come. There is a terror attack on the Quidditch World Cup, there is the expansion of the wizarding world to also now include international schools and issues of international magical cooperation, there is the beginning of wizarding bigotry, there is talk of conspiracies and collusion at the institutional level – all of which Rowling returns to in varying capacities in the subsequent novels. With its readjusted pace and a more dispersed energy than that of the first three works, it is easy to see Goblet of Fire as a pivot, a transitory space between the story that was and the one that is to come. What was more striking, however, was the novel’s confidence of being one in a series. There comes with this story a willingness to lay down plot points to come back to later, a push towards planning for arcs that might not be resolved by the end of Goblet’s 600-odd pages, and hence an ease in how characters are allowed to develop.  

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Currently reading: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, while also simultaneously searching fiction that will consume my imagination.