Kiran Desai: catching a glimpse in the forest

Some writers make their novels out of beautiful, well-turned sentences, and some from flowing pages. In the popular jargon, some novelists work at the level of the sentence, crafting their worked-upon language, while others are immersive story-tellers. This second type of writer is more liable to be dismissed by highbrow, aesthete, or flat-out pretentious reviewers, while the first type is likely to be found wanting by a certain sort of practitioner-critic. If there is still such a thing as highbrows who hate middlebrows, this is the topic on which the highs will be roused to a bear-like defence of the narrow principles they hold to be dear and self-evident.

In The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia, as in her previous two novels (The Inheritance of Loss and Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard), Kiran Desai is squarely the second type of author. There is nothing wrong with her sentences: many are lovely, and some of them have an aphoristic turn: but she writes pages, not phrases: one often feels the sharp pull at the end of her chapters as the curtain falls, suddenly, and cuts us off from the immersion we had reached. One feels, too, the lack of craft in some of her sentences. But that is no matter: indeed, much of the time, it is part of how she makes her immersive pages.

Here is half a page from The Inheritance of Loss, which gives as good a demonstration of this effect as any.

This aqueous season would last three months, four, maybe five. In Cho Oyu, a leak dripping into the toilet played a honky-tonk, until it was interrupted by Sai, who held an umbrella over herself when she went inside the bathroom. Condensation fogged the glass of clocks, and clothes hanging to dry in the attic remained wet for a week. A white scurf sifted down from the beams, a fungus spun a shaggy age over everything. Bits of color, though, defined this muffled scene: insects flew in carnival gear; bread, in a day, turned green as grass; Sai, pulling open her underwear drawer, found a bright pink jelly scalloping the layers of dreary cotton; and the bound volumes of National Geographic fell open to pages bruised with flamboyant disease, purple-yellow molds rivaling the bower birds of Papua New Guinea, the residents of New Orleans, and the advertisements—“It’s better in the Bahamas!”—that it

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