Inheriting Loss

I just finished The Inheritance of Loss. I was not blown away by the ending, nor was I bitterly disappointed ... I put the book down with a sort of "so that's how it goes" feeling. Which ultimately, I suppose, might have been what Desai was aiming for.

There's no question that the last 120 pages or so were the best. The narrative finally swept me up, becoming vibrantly poignant at times, the characters at last coming into their own with great pathos. When the judge loses Mutt to the beggars, I could feel my heart break with his, could see myself out in the jungles calling fruitlessly for a dog that would never come, jingling the empty end of a leash at the world and asking "Why?" And I suppose that is an apt metaphor for what all of Desai's characters were doing, in the end - the interesting thing is that they each needed to be stripped of whatever it was originally guiding them on the leash in order to see better the hand that was on the other end.

I re-read some of the criticism on the novel after finishing it, and while the New York Times review of Desai's book (by Pankaj Mishra) is overwhelmingly positive (yeah, I couldn't have helped but wonder how Kakutani would have approached it), I have to disagree with the last paragraph:


... Desai offers her characters no possibility of growth or redemption. Though relieved by much humor, "The Inheritance of Loss" may strike many readers as offering an unrelentingly bitter view. But then, as Orhan Pamuk wrote soon after 9/11, people in the West are "scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population," which "neither magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manages to fathom." This is the invisible emotional reality Desai uncovers as she describes the lives of people fated to experience modern life as a continuous affront to their notions of order, dignity and justice. We do not need to agree with this vision in order to marvel at Desai's artistic power in expressing it.


I'm not quite so certain that there is no possibility of growth or redemption. For what is the return of the prodigal son if not redemptive? Yes, Biju was the promised one who was supposed to make his fortune in American and redeem them all through his success abroad - but his homecoming is one made not in defeat, but in triumph, an Odysseus coming back to his roots after wandering too far from his true ground. Yes, he has been robbed and stripped of his clothes and injured - "A bent-over woman dragging one leg onerously," Desai writes. Yet, as I said before, he NEEDED this complete loss of everything he had in order to rediscover the Biju waiting hauntedly inside the assimilated mask, the brown hand trembling on the end of the empty leash where a powdered white and pink one used to be.

The final image of the book is, indeed, overwhelmingly hopeful:


At the gate, peeping through the black, lace wrought iron, between the mossy cannonballs, was the figure in a nightgown.

"Pitaji?" said the figure, all ruffles and colors.

Kanchenjunga appeared above the parting clouds, as it did only very early in the morning during this season -

"Biju?" whispered the cook -

"Biju!" he yelled, demented -

Sai looked out and saw two figures leaping at each other as the gate swung open.

The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with the kind of luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent.

All you needed to do was reach out and pluck it.


Now come ON, Mishra, don't sit there and tell me this novel offers no hope! Father-son reunions have been the definition of hope from the beginning of literature. With the pretty, eligible girl waiting in the wings, no less. Yes, I think the reader is supposed to feel that once the monsoon passes, a rebuilding can occur, albeit one that has to recognize that running away from your troubles is no way to build a successful life. The novel overwhelmingly rejects the idea of immigration, and implies less-than-subtly that India needs the full devotion of its people in order to build itself anew after each storm. And in the end, family and love and belief are more sustaining than any number of American dollars.

Now that I've written all that, I feel very positive about this novel. It did drag for a while, but the payoff was worth it.

On to different pastures soon ... perhaps attacking my first Pynchon?