Thrity Umrigar wrote a nuanced and sensitive exploration of the Indian employer-servant relationship in The Space Between Us, but sad to say, her latest novel Honor displays little of that nuance or sensitivity.
There are two women at the center of Honor who tell their stories in their own voices. One is Smita, an Indian-American journalist with very negative memories of the India she left twenty years before. The other is Meena, a young Hindu woman from a Gujarat village who has been brutalized by her community for the crime of marrying a Muslim — her husband burnt alive, and Meena barely surviving. The two women’s stories are told in alternating chapters, but there is an imbalance from the start: Smita is in India to report on the trial of Meena’s brothers for the horrific crime, and the novel is largely from her point-of-view. We read her thoughts about Meena, but never Meena’s thoughts about her.
Right away, this makes for a Smita-centric novel, and she is the less interesting of the two characters. Opinionated, bitter, and naive, she is sophisticated in the sense of living by herself in Brooklyn, traveling the world on work, and having brunches in Manhattan, but she has an astonishing lack of self-awareness. Positioning her at the center also makes the novel seem like yet another examination of the miseries of third-world women from a Western gaze.
The novel has all the problems typical of a first-time author: showing rather than telling, two main voices which hardly sound different, erratic Indianisms in dialogue, characters who are made much of and then dropped abruptly, black-and-white good-and-evil, and uneven pacing. Yet, Umrigar is a veteran author with at least ten novels to her name; it is perplexing that this novel is so poor.
Several social issues are front and center: misogyny, patriarchy, religious intolerance, archaic rural mores, class, corruption, and (as indicated by the title) misguided notions of honor. Much of this is laid out in plain text, all told, not shown.
A Hindu and a Muslim could never be together — everybody knew that timeless truth.
Traditions are like eggs — once you break one, it is impossible to put it back inside its shell.
No female has a right to any savings. All their money belongs to the head of the household. This is our custom.
Plotwise, there is little to be surprised by, nor do the plot developments shine a new light on any of the grim social issues. The backstories of Meena and Smita appear awkwardly interspersed with current events. Towards the end, a hideously violent event seems like the denouement, but (in an extremely odd authorial choice) there are several subsequent chapters involving a unlikely romance for Smita which completely undercut the horror of the event.
Leaving aside the meta-examination, there are plenty of oddities and illogical events in the novel. Smita comes to India only because Shannon, her journalist colleague on the South Asia beat, has fallen sick. Many pages are spent on Shannon’s illness and the translator, Nandita, who refuses to leave Shannon’s side. It is mentioned multiple times that Nandita is devoted to Shannon, and Smita (the Brooklyn sophisticate) makes more than one snarky comment ‘What, is she in love with Shannon or something?’ Yet later Smita talks with sympathy about the victims of anti-gay violence.
When Smita arrives at the airport, the Indian man who picks her up comments on her accent:
You sound like a pucca American.
A mere few pages later, she talks to a waiter in a restaurant and appears astonished when he identifies her as an outsider.
“How’d you know I’m from America?” Smita asked.
Surely Smita, the world-travelling journalist, is used to being identified as American by now? And if she is not, the incident with the man who picked her up at the airport would have reminded her?
Likewise, when Nandini the translator mentions that she should travel in modest shalwar kameez to a conservative village, Smita’s annoyed reaction is ‘Did Nandini think she was some kind of a rookie?’ (p45). Then on page 51 she is surprised that a taxi driver stares at the cleavage displayed by her Tshirt, and a few pages later, makes a sarcastic comment that Nandini thinks her clothes are unsuitable.
It’s all so annoyingly inconsistent, as though the book was written in disparate sections pasted together.
There are frequent hints of an unpleasant history for Smita and her family, and the reason they left for the US. By the time the story is actually told, it has lost its punch because of the many hints, and the reader will have already guessed some part of it. This makes it seem like the author is dragging out the plot for greater suspense, which detracts from the seriousness of the topic.
The dialogue is poorly done. Mohan, the urban and urbane Indian man who accompanies Smita on her investigative trip to Meena’s village, says ‘yaar’ and ‘dost’ at the end of every other sentence, even when those fall oddly. At the same time, he uses very Western phrases like ‘If I may’ and ‘Right you are’.
Smita, we are told, speaks poor Hindi, but supposedly enough to manage talking with the villagers. The dialogue is written in English, so Smita is able to say things like this in Hindi:
Good afternoon. I’m so happy your brother fetched you. We just have a few questions and then we’ll be gone. We want to be fair. Give you a chance to explain things from your point of view.
(in, it is mentioned ‘affected Hindi’). A few pages later, she is unable to understand the word ‘thanda‘ (cold).
Meena’s village dialogue is pretty much the same as the urban Mohan and the American Smita , except that Meena and her sister say things like ‘good-solid wages’ and ‘the food is hot-pot’.
Smita is an unconvincing and annoying protagonist. She remembers that journalists need to ‘control the mike’ and be detached, but despite her decade of experience she cannot seem to manage an interview without interspersing her own unprofessional social commentary. She lectures, harasses and is relentlessly judgemental and hostile to everyone she meets, in often condescending language.
[To Pushpa Auntie, a former neighbour who betrayed her family] This is your privilege talking, Pushpa Auntie.
[To Anjali, the lawyer who is bringing charges against Meena’s brothers] So, you’re not a lawyer. You’re a political activist.
Cliched descriptions and awkward sentences make one squirm.
Fear made her lean forward in her chair.
Meena’s face was a map created by a brutal, misogynistic cartographer.Smita could see the awful, irregular geometry of Meena’s face as past and present, normalcy and deformity, beauty and monstrosity, collided.
The author’s focus on the social issues is well-intentioned, but this is an altogether disappointing effort.
Thank you for reviewing this one, I was also hoping to read it, but now, am not so sure. It is such a pity that Umrigar’s work is so uneven – there have been a few excellent novels, esp at the start of her writing, then her later ones have seemed almost as if a different person wrote them. It is immensely puzzling because many writers mature and get better and better across their oeuvre, but she has gone the opposite way! Am just sorry it wasn’t a good read.
Me too, it’s a real pity. This one is almost as though it was written by 2 different people and pasted together. But (I know I’m preaching to the choir here) shouldn’t the editor have caught that?
You caught the inconsistencies of Smita’s characterisation beautifully. It is as if Umrigar wants it all ways – Smita is a total outsider, has no idea of the nuances and culture of India, and yet Smita is also an insider, fluent enough in Hindi to interview locals and understanding of the delicate cultural implications. Smita’s inconsistency is the weakest part of the novel, and undermines it, unfortunately. It is a novel with interesting things to say, just said so poorly. I liked the bits that showed how Mohan uses his class and gender and wealth to intimidate and to cow resistance – that was well brought out – that the social pecking order is so regimented and so powerful, despite being unspoken. Umrigar picks out the gendered and class issues with a far lighter and more convincing touch, than she does the Indian/American and Hindu/Muslim issues, which were far too heavy-handedly written. The villains are so villainous they are cardboard characters, and the victims are such perfect beings, like Meena, and also her dead husband – too black and white, and so the characters end up being puppets rather than people. Also some side stories as you picked out – Nandini’s, for instance – go nowhere and actually end up adding nothing to the novel. Much could have been made of this side story and character, but despite the build up, it just peeters out. The inconsistency of the rendering of Smita is puzzling, because Umrigar surely knows what a woman who lived in India till she was 12, would know; I can only surmise the author felt caught between readerships – she is trying to make Smita understandable to both an Indian audience, as well as a non-Indian which would find this culture entirely alien, and in so doing, ends up writing such an inconsistent character that she lacks veracity and credibility. Such a pity. It is trying to be a novel which takes up Indian issues – religious strife, which is great – but then it can’t decide whether it wants to also be a novel about diasporic return, Smita, and her feeling both Indian and American, Eastern and Western, and how she reconciles those. The novel perhaps tries to do too much – the personal story (Smita’s) is a mismatch with the political story (Meena’s cross-religious marriage) being told here.
Yes, thanks for mentioning that — indeed, the bits where Mohan used his inborn privilege were very well done, and I should have mentioned that.