Asian American Literature Fans

By Stephen Hong Sohn

Here, I’m reading one of the debuts I was most excited about: Vikram Paralkar’s, Night Theater (Catapult, 2020). I recall reading Paralkar’s prior publication, The Afflictions, which was a kind of fictional encyclopedia that I found very intriguing in terms of both content and form. I could see that Paralkar was already a kind of writer seeking to experiment. He continues to push himself with his debut novel Night Theater. Let’s let the official site give us a basic description: “A surgeon flees a scandal in the city and accepts a job at a village clinic. He buys antibiotics out of pocket, squashes roaches, and chafes at the interventions of the corrupt officer who oversees his work. But his outlook on life changes one night when a teacher, his pregnant wife, and their young son appear. Killed in a violent robbery, they tell the surgeon that they have been offered a second chance at living if the surgeon can mend their wounds before sunrise. So begins a night of quiet work, ‘as if the crickets had been bribed, during which the surgeon realizes his future is tied more closely to that of the dead family than he could have imagined. By dawn, he and his assistant have gained knowledge no mortal should have. In this inventive novel charged with philosophical gravity and sly humor, Vikram Paralkar takes on the practice of medicine in a time when the right to health care is frequently challenged. Engaging earthly injustice and imaginaries of the afterlife, he asks how we might navigate corrupt institutions to find a moral center. Encompassing social criticism and magically unreal drama, Night Theater is a first novel as satisfying for its existential inquiry as for its enthralling story of a skeptical physician who arrives at a greater understanding of life's miracles.”

I very much appreciated the stylistic and generic hybridity at play in this narrative, what this description calls “social criticism and magically unreal drama.” What you begin to realize is that the father of this family, a teacher, has more secrets than he is at first willing to reveal. I must provide a spoiler warning at this point. Eventually, the teacher begins to let the doctor in on more secrets from the afterlife, and we discover that the afterlife is, perhaps, just as corrupt and obscure as real life can be. This revelation is probably the whole philosophical point of the novel: that there may be nothing more than a version of the life we are already in once we pass on into the great unknown, not something great or grand or even evil or diabolical… more of the same, just on a different plane of existence. The final arc does move in an unexpected direction, as the unborn child is extracted from her mother’s womb. Then, the family vanishes, and the doctor is left with this baby, who is not yet alive.

By the conclusion, though, something stirs, and we realize that the dead can give birth to live things. It is this kind of reversal that makes the novel so unexpectedly strange and intriguing. If there is another element to explore, it’s in the novel’s social critique of the medical field, especially as it unfolds in impoverished areas. The need for someone like the doctor is exceedingly great, but he is only forced to that part of the country because of a scandal. In this sense, the novel brings to mind the fact that those who are in the greatest of needs are often the ones who are given the least resources. The novel thus comes off as a meditation on the doctor’s ethos: what principles will he retain in the face of great challenges and how can he intervene to help those in distress, despite how little support he is given?  Without many answers, the novel still finds a way to keep us in its speculative, philosophical thrall.

Buy the Book Here:

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