Over the last few years, many damning reports and videos of police brutality and bias against African-Americans have emerged and been disseminated via the internet, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement. Some parts of the Indian-American community stayed out of the fray, holding conservative opinions on racial issues, and conscious of their own status as the ‘model minority’. But what if the target of police bias was a well-to-do Indian-American kid? Shilpi Somaya Gowda explores this intersection of race, money and justice in her third novel, A Great Country.
The Shah family have recently moved to an upscale Southern California suburb, a marker of their success in America. Their oldest daughter, Deepa, resents her parents’ urging to move to the fancy high school near their new house, and has chosen to stay in the evocatively-named Chavez High. The middle daughter, Maya, has made a friend from a very wealthy family at the new school. And 12-year-old Ajay is ‘on the spectrum’, mainly interested in his robotics club and building drones, until he is arrested for flying a homemade drone near the airport. Against all juvenile laws, he is beaten up and jailed for several hours.
In terms of Indian-American characters, the novel is rounded out by the extremely wealthy, conservative Sharma family and the more liberal Ricky and Archana, allowing the author to provide a range of viewpoints among her characters. The other two families are rather stereotypical, though.
As with so many novels these days, this one is written from multiple perspectives. Priya Shah is still figuring out where she stands on social issues, but mostly wants to fit in and raise fantastically accomplished children. Ashok Shah is relieved to have ‘made it’, but still feels vulnerable. Deepa is a teenager whose best friend is of Mexican origin with an undocumented mother, and feels strongly about social issues. Maya is charmed by the comfortable wealth of her friend’s family. Mateo Diaz, one of the officers involved in Ajay’s arrest, is more sensitive to racial issues than his partner O’Reilly. The idea, of course, is to lay out many points of view to the reader, but it works less well when each chapter involves a lot of telling rather than showing.
The feeling of vulnerability had never entirely gone away, even after nearly two decades in America, even after taking his oath of citizenship. […] Ashok had hoped things would be different for his son in this country, born and raised as an American.
Would he and Vikram have been friends in India, where the complex strictures of caste, privilege and socioeconomic class were harder to escape? Or would Vikram even have become friends with Ashok here, had he known the truth?
Sentences like
She reflected on all that had transpired today and how she’d arrived here.
seem simply a device to go back in time and describe previous events, and they come across as rather stolid and unimaginative writing.
There are a few awkward sentences:
And in this little makeshift home, on the lumpy futon she shared with her husband, Priya was finally able to sleep peacefully for a full night, for as long back as she could remember.
Was my e-copy missing a part of that sentence?
Many conversations capture the variety of opinions among the Indian-Americans, and I got the feeling these were reflective of conversations from the author’s own experience.
[after an incident similar to the Trayvon Martin case] “That poor woman. Just out for a walk, and her boy gets shot down.”
“Well, not exactly,” Veena said […]. “He was acting suspicious. Not that it justifies what the police did. I’m just saying, you have to keep your nose clean.”
“Suspicious? He just had his hands in his pockets,” Archana said.
“Yes, his very baggy pockets that could have held anything,” Veena said. “At least that’s what the police thought.”
All the South-Asian-American social issues feature somewhere in this novel. Skin colour. Caste bias at tech companies. The brutal process of H1-B visas. The suspicion against brown-skinned Americans after 9/11. Sexual abuse hidden within families. The author has a light hand with these issues, though, working them into conversations and events while keeping the main focus on the fallout from Ajay’s arrest.
The initial reaction by the Shahs to keep the arrest private, but of course, once the press and activist groups got involved, their new suburb became all too aware of the events. The reactions by the community — some supportive, some resentful at the press intrusion into their suburb, some openly or subtly racist — were well done.
So, not great writing, but I applaud the author for tackling a complicated and topical issue.
I just finished reading A Great Country and concur with the last sentence of your review, Susan. I started it weeks ago grabbed by the first sentence “While twelve-year-old Ajay sat trembling in a jail cell…” Not the usual start to Indian-American fiction. I almost gave up, though…Ajay sat there while the author spent over 100 pages on every other member of poor Ajay’s family. Basically, there was way too much going on in the story for me, with every other character – family members, neighbors, strangers – Ajay was lost in the crowd. Agree also that all the usual SAsian social issues feature, sometimes…just because? The incest angle, for example, without it would Priya Shah – the 20-year Indian immigrant, a mother/wife/friend/neighbor, have felt or acted different? And, the children – son arrested, one daughter detained by the police and the third – why the need to also throw in shopliftting/truancy/teenage sex? And then have Priya muse, in the most disappointing sentence of the book for me, “Perhaps Maya’s behavior was the natural endpoint of all the assimilation and success she and Ashok had encouraged in their children…”
Thanks for pointing out that sentence, Reeta, I’d missed that. Yes, rather a sad sentence, but perhaps this was intended to show Priya’s thought processes, which evolve? I liked the reactions of the family and the neighbours, and I liked Priya’s activism towards the end.