New Voices in Fiction
Debut books from Creative Writing Program alums Rishi Reddi (GRS’01) and Jessica Lott (GRS’04) are getting good reviews, including ours.
By Natalie Jacobson McCracken
Every year, alumni of the Creative Writing Program do what they joined the program to do: publish. Some publish poetry, other plays, but many focus on fiction. Two graduates have recently had their debut books published and are receiving good notices. Here are their reviews from Bostonia.
Karma and Other Stories
Rishi Reddi (GRS’01)
Ecco/HarperCollins
Justice Shiva Ram Murthy of India, now retired and living with his daughter in Boston, is furious: furious with the gum-chewing girl at the fast-food counter who ignorantly caused him to accidentally eat beef, although as a Hindu and a Brahmin he is a lifelong vegetarian; furious with his childhood friend and with the lawyer (a young woman!) he has engaged to sue the restaurant because they both make light of this indignity; so furious with his daughter because she obviously wouldn’t understand that he doesn’t tell her about it.
Opening this collection, Murthy’s story establishes the theme: Indians adjusting to life in the United States. That’s become familiar fiction, but in presenting Indian traditions, Reddi is never pedantic; her domestic and internal conflicts are universals. Newly widowed, Arundhati has come from India to be with her son near Boston, as is proper. But family life in the United States is not what she is accustomed to, and she longs for home. When she decides to return to India, her son is unreasonably furious by American standards, but he responds as any affectionate son living in a close society would: “What would people say? . . . What if you were hurt in the village? How could I live?”
The anger of the heads of these paternalistic households and the women’s dread of it are part — but not a large part — of the stories. These are good people, sympathetically presented; only one supporting character is disagreeable, and he has a point. The parents who believe in arranged marriages are motivated by the universal desire to secure a happy life for their children and are otherwise modern: one father tells his daughter to give up her dedication to classical Indian dance and go to medical school. The daughters, in their separate stories, want romance but not, at least now, marriage. Still, they can’t enjoy sex with their (remarkably loving, patient) boyfriends. Sixteen-year-old Uma and her Karl stand in his bedroom, naked together for the first time. “But at the crucial moment, she said no. . . . She replayed that moment in her mind many times, the moment she said no. It puzzled her.” These determinedly hip American girls are, finally, Indian.
Osin
Jessica Lott (GRS’04)
Low Fidelity Press
Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, a young writer’s first fiction is not inevitably thinly disguised memoir. Three years after completing a creative writing master’s, Lott debuts with a sixty-seven-year-old protagonist, recently retired and bereft, his wife having just left him for another man. Osin Vachell is living alone and he can’t bear it. Panicked, he flees to the home of his first wife, expecting her to be warmly welcoming, grateful for his presence. She’s not.
The book’s spare title signals the story that follows. Clean, polished prose and plot are background for sharply delineated characters, their complexity revealed in small but telling ways over an economical ninety-five pages.
First there is Osin, secure in the knowledge that he is beloved, a great and irresistible lover now as ever, and without sin, so how can anybody cast aspersions? Well, he was unfaithful to his first wife, but guilt is generally associated with regret, and he can’t regret something that gave him such pleasure, then and in retrospect. Both wives are inexplicably angry. And OK, when he left his first wife, he also left their young son, but remaining cool now in middle age is unreasonable. As Osin begins to gain the little self-knowledge he is capable of and to need less love, physical and otherwise, the feelings of the three people who matter also evolve, surprisingly and inevitably.
Sad, funny, and touching, just like real life, Osin won last year’s Low Fidelity Press biennial novella award. That too seems inevitable.