A Review of Karan Mahajan’s Family Planning (Harper Perennial).

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

 A Review of Karan Mahajan’s Family Planning (Harper Perennial).

It is a great pleasure to write on Karan Mahajan’s Family Planning if only to say that the novel is extremely funny read, with memorable characters and outrageous pop culture references, the kind of book that is very accessible but still addresses weighty issues related to politics and transnationalism and national consciousness.  At the center of the novel is the relationship between a father, Rakesh Ahuja, and his son, Arjun, the product of one marriage that ended prematurely in the death of Ahuja’s first wife, Rashmi.  What catalyzes the plot forward is the accidental moment in which Arjun walks in on his father having sex with the woman PRESUMED to be his mother.  I say this because it is soon explained that Arjun does not know that his biological mother died and that who he thinks of as his mother, Sangita, is in reality his stepmother.  Rakesh has never told him this information, but the moment of “coitus interruptus” does begin to push Rakesh to considering telling Arjun who his “true” mother is.  As another element to the plot, Rakesh works as a kind of “urban planner” for the government, operating in one instance to construct more flyovers, those portions of highway or freeway that are placed on platforms essentially and move over large swathes of neighborhood.  Neferti X. Tadiar wrote a wonderful piece on the politics of the “flyover” in Manila (“Manila’s Metropolitan Form”) and I’m reminded here of those issues related to class, poverty, and other such elements in the construction of major highways and freeways in large cities.  Mahajan rounds out the context of the novel by placing Arjun as the oldest son in a family of thirteen children.  While Sangita could have been drawn out as a simplistic character, her own narrative arc is fascinating and hilarious and develops of course the fascination of Indian culture with the filmic and screen imaginary, referencing in some oblique ways the global emergence of Bollywood cultures. 

 

A wonderful interview with the author can be found here:

 

http://therumpus.net/2009/01/the-rumpus-interview-with-karan-mahajan/

 

What is interesting about the interview is that Mahajan claims status as an Indian writer and not as an Indian American writer, thus effectively cleaving off a connection to Asian American literature per se, despite the fact that the content of the novel might suggest otherwise.  While majority of the novel is centralized in New Delhi, there are major plot elements that are catalyzed by Rakesh’s schooling in the United States.  Further, the global scope of the novel is often put into motion by the hilarious pop culture moments.  But, what is clear is that the “ethnic” writers of the day, whether or not he chooses to identify in one particular way is far more away of the contoured terrain of Anglophone literatures and it is a testament of the change in canonical considerations that writers of various backgrounds look more and more to dialogue with and against other writers that might be categorized in a similar fashion.  Consequently, in some ways, it is heartening to think about Mahajan’s own construction of the Indian writers course and how that became a way into thinking about his own work.  While he diverges from many of the strains of these works, Family Planning does remind me of the very contemporary quality of Mohsin Hamid’s writings, especially in Moth Smoke, where he renders Lahore with a mix of pop culture, urban density, and class stratification. 

 

Arjun, perhaps as the typical angsty “global” teenager is looking to impress Aarti, and the way in which he hopes to “get the girl” is by creating a rock band, one that is very influenced by the work of Bryan Adams.  I couldn’t help but find myself laughing absolutely out loud at these moments, precisely because of these transpositions of music and “global” teen angst.  The accessibility of these “north American” pop culture references gives Family Planning a kind of breezy quality, but the novel is not to be mistaken solely as “light fare” because of its humorous attitude.  Perhaps as it most sardonic moments, Mahajan does interject the problematics related to nepotism and corruption in contemporary India, where connections and class standing seems to provide routes to escape punishment and incarceration.  While the main characters often seem to be beneficiaries of such advantages, there is a slight disarticulation in terms of the narration that suggests that we are not to read such moments as merely passing responses to inequity.  Indeed, there are often times when one cannot but think how privileged Arjun is and that his quest to seek Aarti’s affections stands as a testament to the relative bourgeois life of the family.  Such class politics are always-already ingrained into the narrative through the projects that Arjun’s father, Rakesh, involves himself within related to urban design and highway planning. 

 

By being able to place the sociopolitics of contemporary Indian life alongside a humorous tone, Mahajan’s Family Planning does achieve this intricate balance in this felicitous debut. 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Family-Planning-Novel-Karan-Mahajan/dp/006153725X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244650170&sr=8-1

New book: Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Ali Sethi is coming to the Twin Cities to do a reading from his new novel The Wish Maker.

The Wish Maker is a coming-of-age story set in 1990s Pakistan, a story about two children and the family they grow up in, the people and the places they come to know and love. It's a story about Lahore, the city, seen gradually through the decades; a story about Benazir Bhutto and the heady promise of democracy, and the recurring nightmare of military intervention; a story about Bollywood movie stars and American TV shows and the different kinds of forbidden love they inspire. But the novel is also intended to be a meditation on the individual consciousness, a journey into the soul's capacity to know other souls, to recognize itself in others and to grant others the validity it grants itself, which is the validity of desire, of wanting more and better things all the time. This, the capacity for wish-making, for ascribing insatiability and incompletion to other people's ideas of themselves is the central concern of the book.

I might try to stop by and pick up the novel though he's reading in the 'burbs somewhere, and I'm somewhat lazy.