An uncommonly multicultural family with common problems

At its outset, Dava Shastri’s Last Day seems pleasantly nonconformist. The eponymous central figure is a self-made billionaire. Despite having been brought up in the US as an Indian-American, she does not suffer from ethnic existential angst. She marries a Swede, Arvid Persson, and her parents do not seem to agonize over her choice of mate. She manages two foundations.

Dava has four adult children:

Sita is Type A, and runs the Dava Shastri Foundation with ruthless efficiency. She is married to Colin and has twin boys.

Arvie (Arvind) is irritable, works very occasionally for the Helping Persson’s Foundation named for their father, is married to the chef Vincent, and has two teenage daughters. The fact that this is a same-sex marriage is a complete non-issue to his family.

Kali is the odd child out, still finding herself, in a polygamous relationship with a couple (again, not a source of consternation for anyone, except that they worry whether Kali is truly happy). She and Rev, the youngest, have always been very close.

Rev is the child who barely knew his father. He has brought his new fiance, Sandi, to their Christmas gathering. Sandi is eager to be part of the family, but is insecure and needy.

And all of them, thanks to Dava’s fortune, are very very rich. None of them need to work, and if they do, it is at the family foundation.

The Shastri-Persson children acted as if their wealth didn’t exist, even as their every sentence and gesture shone with it. Their clothes were so expensive they didn’t have labels, as Rev had once confessed to her that their wardrobes were designed for them personally, even items as simple as T-shirts and jeans. All of their foreheads were smooth, never dinged with the creases of those who worried about student debt or living paycheck to paycheck, as if they walked around the world in Bubble Wrap, fully able to see class and income disparities but completely untouched by them.

Dava and her four children, their partners and children (except for Kali’s polygamous duo) have gathered at the massive house on Dava’s private island for Christmas, as usual. There is an unusually specific reason this time: Dava has terminal cancer and has decided to end her life the day after Christmas. She likes to control the story: she has planned for the announcements of her passing to come out the day before the scheduled injection, so that she can read the obituaries with pleasure — about her career, how she made her money, the good done by her foundations and expressions of mourning by those who knew her.

Things don’t work out quite that well. The tabloids and social media sites, it turns out, are more interested in celebrity dirt than glowing eulogy, and they dig deep. Two long-buried secrets come to light over the course of the novel.

So, interesting enough premise, and apparently unusual characters. Why, then, does this novel feel so flat after the initial trajectory?

Things move very slowly; not quite well-written or detailed enough for an in-depth examination of family, but not fast-paced enough for a plot-driven novel. The secrets are brought out over several rather dull chapters of backstory. There is a lot of intra-family dialogue and sibling squabbling which seems no different than any other family. The chapters shift back and forth between various periods in the past and the present, but Dava’s history is not terribly unusual or interesting, and seems artificially put together for the plot. There are a large number of secondary characters who are not well developed, and therefore do not hold the reader’s interest. Which reader could care whether Rev and Sandi’s unborn child will get his or her ‘rightful’ share of the family fortune? Or whether Sita continues working for the foundation or strikes out on her own? Given the massive financial buffer, there are no real risks to any choice, which completely removes any tension (or reader interest) in the final decisions.

The author puts some effort into fleshing out the environment. The Shastri mansion is quite odd:

it shared the same layout and architecture as [a Swiss chalet], but had tripled the square footage. […] — vaulted timber ceilings, stone walls, wood beams — her manor was vast yet hollow, akin to a museum costumed as a vacation home. A home that didn’t see a lot of visitors, or even a housekeeper, judging by the faint seaweed odor and furnishings coated with dust.

And despite all the money, there is no chef, food, or even a plan for feeding 8 adults and 4 children for several days except for some frozen pizzas. Shastri is one of those eccentric billionaires, it seems.

Flipping through this novel again, I was surprised to realize that it was set in 2044. If you didn’t pay attention to the dates, you would likely not have noticed. This timeframe was a poor choice: the author is not imaginative enough to devise a world 20 years from now. So there are apparently no technological changes: people in this book use cellphones, watch movies on TVs, and use tablets. While inter-ethnic or same-sex relationships are taken for granted, hints of affairs or ‘illegitimate’ children are still apparently viewed with obsessive fascination. It’s all exactly the same as 2021.

So, interesting premise and atypical characters, but there is just not enough here to make for a book that holds the reader’s attention.

p.s. is it just me or does the woman on the cover look extraordinarily like Rekha?