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Book
Brilliantly discomfiting
Book:
Family Life
Author: Akhil Sharma
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A brilliantly discomfiting story of the American dream gone sour,
that has since won the 2015 Folio Prize
 The lure of the American dream was felt far beyond its own shores
during the 20th century. In Akhil Sharma’s remarkable second novel,
Family Life, which opens in 1978, Mrs. Mishra is treated with prickly
jealousy by her Delhi neighbours after her husband, having settled in
New York as a government clerk, sends them plane tickets. Their rascally
youngest son Ajay cannot stop talking about the land of “jet packs and
chewing gum”. When they join Mr. Mishra at his apartment, with its
elevators and hot water on tap, America initially lives up to its mythic
glamour.
Yet after the eldest brother Birju smashes his head while diving into
a swimming pool, any prospect of prosperity, liberty or happiness seems
to be snuffed out.
Forced to accept a shabby litigation settlement, they struggle to
care for their brain-damaged son at home. Mrs. Mishra, drawn to quack
cures, lashes out bitterly at her heavy-drinking husband.
Neglected by his parents, Ajay is dubbed a freak by his white
schoolmates for making up lies that glorify his brother’s pre-accident
talents. There is no escaping the desperate fact that Birju will never
get better.How Ajay handles this tragedy brings sparkle back into this
finely balanced narrative. Daydreaming, he chats with God, who gives him
laconic advice while dressed like Clark Kent in a grey cardigan.
After acquiring a taste for Hemingway, Ajay emulates his tough,
detached brevity in his own short stories, which probe what happened to
his family with a few artful concealments. Because Family Life is
largely autobiographical, that same impeccable control also gives
Sharma’s novel its cool, touchable surface, despite the molten grief
below.Although a compact novel by any standards, Sharma unearths a
plethora of shrewd and moving truths about the nuclear family,
particularly its propensity to emotional violence.
It is sheer relief when lonely Ajay’s habit of whispering “I love
you” to girls at school improbably yields a sweet, understanding first
girlfriend. Upon Birju’s homecoming, local South Asians flock round to
mop the floors and festoon the house with flowers. Perhaps, as this
brilliantly discomfiting novel intimates, only other people can supply
an effective palliative for the ailments of family life
- Benjamin Evan, Telegraph
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