Flimsy personalities and plot

~ The Village Bride of Beverley Hills, by Kavita Daswani ~

The Village Bride of Beverly Hills operates on the pleasant conceit that in the cut-throat world of Hollywood journalism, nice girls finish first. And more, even a girl whose writing is like a third-grade essay, who has no investigative talent, and no innate dress sense or social skills for the many star-studded events she attends, can still triumph above other aspiring reporters who have all these abilities.

If you can overlook this basic flaw, you may still enjoy the book. It falls clearly into the chick-lit genre, where serious topics are covered with a lightweight froth of clothes and men. In this case, the story follows Priya from Delhi, who marries Sanjay Sohni in an arranged marriage and ends up in the Los Angeles area in a joint family home. Among her new housemates are Sanjay’s parents and younger sister Malini.

Sanjay’s parents encourage her to get a job to add to the family income, but are firm about their requirements: the job should be respectable, she should dress “properly” (by their standards), and she should fulfill all her household duties of cooking and cleaning after work. Priya ends up, quite by chance, as a receptionist at a glamorous Hollywood magazine.

And thus begins her meteoric rise to fame and fortune. Movie stars instantly take to her, apparently because of her “convent-educated” accent, politeness, and complete lack of conversation. Hardheaded executives offer her plum jobs sight unseen, despite her lack of writing ability and unmarketable notions about maintaining celebrity privacy.

Predictably, her home life heads downwards as her career star rises. Her in-laws are grimly conventional, old-fashioned, and unpleasant. Her husband, occasionally affectionate in the early days of their marriage, turns out to be self-centered and childish. As a reader, you know home and work are going to implode in the last third of the book, and so they do. But this is a romance novel, so you also know that all loose ends will conveniently be tied up at the end, whatever machinations of plot or personality are required for this to happen. You will not be disappointed.

Priya displays no personality in particular: she is a blank slate waiting to be written upon by all and sundry. She’s happy in her dowry salwars or her mother-in-law’s old clothes until a stylish friend sneers at them, but revels in high fashion once that comes her way. She has no complaints about her in-law’s unreasonable demands of pista milk at 10 pm or weekends spent scrubbing the house. She never thinks of asking why Malini, her unemployed sister-in-law, is not expected to help with housework, while Priya is expected to spend all her spare time looking after the entire family and house.

Her husband is appalled at the touchy-feely nature of a therapy session (“blow into your heart chakra”??!), but Priya remains unquestioningly convinced of its value. Her arranged marriage appears to be the only feature of her past or present life that interests the people she meets, but she draws no interesting insights from this.

This lack of personality, unfortunately, extends to all the characters — the parents, the husband, the sister-in-law, the boss, the envious colleague. The luckier characters have one distinguishing trait, such as unpleasantness, but no other signs of humanity.

Daswani has some annoying writing habits: she often equates “Hindu” with “Indian”, and generalizes customs associated with some communities. For example:

Hindu brides don’t simply take on their husband’s surname, but a new first and middle appellation as well, so I assumed I was to go from Priyanka Chandru Mehta to something else entirely.

This statement will no doubt come as a surprise to many Hindu communities in India. Perhaps it is too much to expect that lightweight novels should be culturally accurate, but there are other expat authors who do a much better job with the details.

The work issues of a fresh immigrant in an upscale high-fashion environment could have been an interesting new contribution to the genre, but we’ll have to wait for another writer to fill this niche.

The Village Bride of Beverley Hills, by Kavita Daswani. Putnam Adult, 2004.