The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.

[zugenia.livejournal.com]

What is it about pristine prose that leaves me a little cold? This morning around 5am, I finished The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji. Let me say from the start that Vassanji is obviously an important writer; I intend to read his other novels soon, and Vikram Lall is both historically provocative and beautifully written. Lall, the middle-aged narrator, tells his life story from self-imposed exile in Ontario. He is a third-generation Indian African, born and raised in Kenya; his grandfather labored on the railway system that connected those branches of the British Empire, and Lall comes of age as that empire crumbles, leaving him and the Asian populations of Africa in the tenuous, "in-between world" of the title. Unlike many of their fellow postcolonial subjects, Lall's family remain in Africa as Kenyan citizens instead of fleeing to Great Britain or India, both mythological homelands. As a young man, Lall carves out a life for himself in the unstable and corrupt spaces at the margins of the newly sovereign nation; his story is that of a disavowed citizen, a remnant of a cast-off empire who can lay claim neither to bygone colonial power nor postcolonial national enfranchisement. By the novel's end, it is clear that Lall represents an entire population for whom the "homeland" is split asunder—India and England are mere ideas, represented by postcards from friends and family lore, while Africa is real, visceral, familiar, but will only recognize its Indian children as national embarrassments.

Reading Vassanji's prose reminded me of my past reactions to Chang-Rae Lee, another contemporary literary power. Both write beautifully—and, perhaps more importantly, coherently—about the conditions of fragmentation and alienation that are hallmarks of modern global subjectivity. And both leave me feeling at once impressed and suspicious. In the case of Vassanji's Vikram Lall, I kept wondering how someone so displaced could narrate his life with such pristine authority. This is a version of the problem Zadie Smith discusses in her recent review of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, of which she writes, "it seems perfectly done—in a sense that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait." The whole point of Lall's story—of his existence—is that is falls in between the categories on which we rely to structure our understanding of the world, its nations, its peoples. World history does not account for him or his experience. So why is he able to represent himself in such pitch-perfect novelistic realism?

The real question here (it's not exactly a critique, or if it is, it's an academic one) is whether this is a novel that understands literary realism as part of a hegemonic cultural regime—in this case, the very British imperialism whose fissures produce Vikram Lall in the first place. I don't mean to suggest that this would be a better, or more authentic, novel if it were more formally traumatized, in the vein of, say, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. I just wonder to what extent Vikram Lall's pristine representation of the mess that is human history is aware of how it uses fiction as a refuge, a place where the unrepresented find perfect representation, where the world's in-betweens achieve full, uncompromised authority. In the course of discovering that the world has no place for him, Vikram Lall unhesitantly claims the realm of the novel as his sovereign domain; from sentence one, it is clear that in these pages, he is at home.