asianamlitfans | A Review of Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana (Knopf, 2018)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Ah, so I’m lucky to have some former students who like to be in sort of informal book clubs! One such engagement leads me to review Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana (Knopf, 2018). Kumar has published quite a bit, but I’m not sure I have had a chance to review his work until this one, and what a doozy. Autofiction is a complicated, complex beast. Let’s go with the marketing description at this point: “Carrying a single suitcase, Kailash arrives in post-Reagan America from India to attend graduate school. As he begins to settle into American existence, Kailash comes under the indelible influence of a charismatic professor, and also finds his life reshaped by a series of very different women with whom he recklessly falls in and out of love. Looking back on the formative period of his youth, Kailash’s wry, vivid perception of the world he is in, but never quite of, unfurls in a brilliant melding of anecdote and annotation, picture and text. Building a case for himself, both as a good man in spite of his flaws and as an American in defiance of his place of birth, Kailash weaves a story that is at its core an incandescent investigation of love—despite, beyond, and across dividing lines.”

My former student and I were initially attracted to the title since there isn’t a place called Immigrant, Montana. We did think though that Montana would feature more heavily in this novel, but it doesn’t. This novel is more of the campus genre type, with the text moving through Kailash’s experience in graduate school and the various relationships that he has with women, as he moves through his dissertation writing. Many of the chapters are structured around these relationships. In “Jennifer,” we see how Kailash ends up in what seems to be a casual relationship with a bookstore employee. The relationship eventually gets complicated when Jennifer gets pregnant. She eventually decides to get an abortion, with Kailash not fully understanding that his relative apathy toward Jennifer’s pregnancy serves to suggest that Kailash is not serious enough about their long-term potential. In “Nina,” we see Kailash’s first relationship with someone who is also in graduate school and all the complications that might arise out of that dynamic. Whereas one might have described Kailash as somewhat aloof with Jennifer, the opposite is true with Nina. Kailash struggles to figure out how serious their connection might be, and eventually it becomes apparent that Nina does not seem to be as invested in their romance as Kailash is. With “Cai,” it would seem that Kailash has finally met someone who might be the appropriate match. The problem, as we discover, is that Kailash, has been an unreliable narrator pretty much all along. Kailash, while seemingly being invested in romance, has often had dalliances on the side, and we begin to see the catastrophic emergence of this habit with the way that his connection with Cai ultimately implodes. As someone who has gone to graduate school, I found this particular novel quite difficult to get through just in terms of subject matter. Yet, Kumar finds much richness in the messiness and the sensitivity of these connections, so he makes the most of these campus dynamics. His portrayal of major professors in a given program seems to verge somewhat on hagiography, but that might seem appropriate from the purview of the ways that graduate students tend to put their mentors on pedestals. You might be wondering: what about dissertation writing? Well, Kumar knows as well as anyone else that a novel that covered the trials and tribulations of this process would not be very compelling to read as entertainment, so he generally avoids giving us too much information about this process and for that, we in the know, thank him.

Buy the Book Here