The Blind Writer by Sameer Pandya
There are several different ways to open a review of The Blind Writer, a collection of short stories and a novella by Indian-American writer and educator Sameer Pandya, but I am going to start with that hyphen. While the author is Indian-American and the protagonists are Indian-Americans, these are not, except superficially, Asian- or Indian-American stories.
There is no immigrant angst or crisis of culture: these stories are populated by people who seem entirely assimilated. Some sport saris, others consume samosas, they have names like Rakesh, Sanjay and Anil, and there is the occasional but largely true stereotype (spelling bees have in recent years tended to be won by students of Indian descent), but the stories and characters themselves are American in all the ways that matter.
I usually try not to quote a book’s jacket copy, but The Blind Writer’s makes it clear that this was very much the intention:
The characters share a similar sensibility: a sense that immigration is a distant memory, yet an experience that continues to shape the decisions they make in subtle and surprising ways as they go about the complicated business of everyday living.
Viewed from this side of the Pacific, where much English-language writing concerns itself with issues of ethnic identity, culture and language, this example of unhyphenated hyphenated fiction is unusual and, I think, noteworthy.
The book’s first half consists of five short stories. The short story, as has been said before but is worth repeating, is a tricky and unforgiving form: characterization, situation, plot and conflict must all happen within just a few thousand words.
Pandya, if these examples are any indication, has control of the craft. The stories employ no gimmicks, have no over-the-top characters or attention-grabbing situations. They are instead deceptively simple, unrolling gently—the attention paid to pacing is evident—until endings that are alternately forceful, final or unexpected. If anything, the craft is a bit too visible: it doesn’t do to speculate, but it seems less-than-coincidental that Pandya teaches, among other things, creative writing.
The short stories, which act rather like a warm-up for the novella, cover mostly banal circumstances of everyday life: a mother’s manipulation of a spelling bee, a black sheep of a son just released from a stint in prison, commitment problems in relationships, the social competition for the trappings of commercial success, a chance meeting on the subway, family dynamics.
The banality is not bland; rather it provides the neutral, cream-colored paper from which Pandya’s conflicts and tensions emerge. While there are naturally numerous references to Indianness, the stories are anchored in a familiarity that gives several a cringe-inducing there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I quality that crosses ethnic lines.
The stories are spurred along by Pandya’s gift for quiet, laconic observation that ranges from wry and ironic to snide or absurd. A newly built mansion, the hostess of which sports “large diamond studs, the size of small peanuts”, features “a large fountain—a Venus de Milo with water spraying out of her arms”; the protagonist’s teenage daughter, clearly too smart for her own good, observes “Their website must get more hits than ours.”
The novella, from which the book takes its name, packs a novel’s worth of writing into the book’s second half. Rather than seeming short, it instead comes across as lean and spare, just as long as it need be, but no longer.
It is a triangular story involving a young graduate student, an aging, blind yet celebrated writer and his younger, attractive wife. The triangle involves love, but also intellect and ambition. Rakesh, the student, is called upon to be a companion to Anil, the writer—reading, talking, stimulating perhaps—while Rakesh is an aspiring writer himself, as is, indeed, Anil’s wife Mira. On the edges of this triangle are the failed marriage of Rakesh’s parents and a lost love of his own.
If there were coming of age stories for characters in their twenties, The Blind Writer would be one. Rakesh’s literary reach exceeds his grasp, happiness is fleeting, people and life are often not what they first seemed to be.
One suspects that elements of the novella are to a certain extent autobiographical. This would be hardly unusual, of course. Pandya majored in history at the University of California; Rakesh majored in History and Economics. Both swung towards writing in grad school. Pandya has written about sports; Rakesh did so for the school paper. These details add a certain voyeuristic quality to the reading.
The Blind Writer is a fine and enjoyable collection. Each of the components is finely-tuned; together, they form a composite whole. I don’t suppose many people read short fiction very often; this collection is a reminder why one should.
Is this, however, “Asian” fiction? I think perhaps it is not, but may be all the better for it.