Asian American Literature Fans

A Review of Rakesh Satyal’s No One Can Pronounce my Name (Picador, 2017).
By Stephen Hong Sohn


 

I was really excited to see Rakesh Satyal move out of the first books club! It’s been a little bit of time since Satyal’s debut Blue Boy, but he’s obviously been hard at work perfecting the comic and dramatic undertones of No One Can Pronounce my Name (Picador, 2017). Let’s let B&N do some work for us: “In a suburb outside Cleveland, a community of Indian Americans has settled into lives that straddle the divide between Eastern and Western cultures. For some, America is a bewildering and alienating place where coworkers can’t pronounce your name but will eagerly repeat the Sanskrit phrases from their yoga class. Harit, a lonely Indian immigrant in his mid forties, lives with his mother who can no longer function after the death of Harit’s sister, Swati. In a misguided attempt to keep both himself and his mother sane, Harit has taken to dressing up in a sari every night to pass himself off as his sister. Meanwhile, Ranjana, also an Indian immigrant in her mid forties, has just seen her only child, Prashant, off to college. Worried that her husband has begun an affair, she seeks solace by writing paranormal romances in secret. When Harit and Ranjana’s paths cross, they begin a strange yet necessary friendship that brings to light their own passions and fears.”

I appreciated this particular description because it focuses primarily on the two characters who seem to have the most heft in the narrative space. One critique I had of this work was that there were characters that seemed to drop out of the story almost entirely after having had a strong introductory sequence (such as the queer bartender Achyut). But I digress: once Harit and Ranjana actually meet within the plotting, we start to see what Satyal is doing: creating a multifaceted depiction of a South Asian American immigrant community that extends beyond the domestic space of the home. Particularly compelling then is the unorthodox friendship between Ranjana and Harit, who don’t seem at first to have much in common, but Satyal makes evident that they are the proverbial “strangers in a strange land,” still trying to make their way in an America in which their brown-ness can isolate them.

The concluding sequence is perhaps the strongest, because it involves an unexpected road trip that seems multiple characters find the courage to pursue some of their more idiosyncratic goals. Satyal’s work finds purchase as both a bildungsroman (with respect to Harit) and a kunslterroman (with respect to Ranjana), as each comes to respective terms with their identity as a queer man, on the one hand, and a writer, on the other. The more humorous element to this work did remind me a little bit of a South Asian American version of As Good as It Gets, and this novel is one I will certainly consider teaching in the future. It’s an especially welcome addition to any course potentially exploring queer dynamics in Asian American literature.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu