[1]
Nebraska[2], by Monica Datta, looked intriguing and not just because (I assumed) it seemed to be an Indian immigrant story set in or related somehow to Nebraska – from a blurb about the book:
Anna Chatterjee has just been released from prison. Her husband, Prabir, has arrived to take her home and found her already gone…the question looms: Where is Anna now?
Well, she is in Nebraska. We learn that right at the start:
The ice had formed thick fractal branches on the office window, protecting Anna Chatterjee from the streetlamp’s stinging diamond glare. She had been working all day outdoors in the same swaddling polyester trousers that scraped her sore legs, tessellated and fissured from the Nebraska winter winds, thin nylon sock impersonations three shades too light for her skin that offered no protection from the cold…
How Anna ended up in Nebraska is a long, painful journey – for this reader.
The torture starts in the Prologue, a treatise on annotations, on footnotes, by one Dr. B.X. Roy, a psychoanalyst, who asks the reader, “What, precisely, is the role of the annotation?” Several hundred words later, without providing an answer, Roy asks “So why annotate?” He says it’s so the reader can keep up with events and characters as he tells Anna’s story, derived from the personal papers of one Jean-Louis Katz, a Canadian and French psychiatrist. Generously, Dr. Roy does tell the reader not to read the hundreds of footnotes, if they seem unnecessary. I skipped all but a handful.
Promisingly, Part I moves at a good pace. We meet most of of the story’s main characters in relatively (it would turn out) straightforward snippets. There’s Anna, released after almost 13 years in prison and ‘adopted’ by the Reverend Gubrud and his wife, do-gooding missionaries who promise Anna a born-again life on their farm in Nebraska. Her husband, Prabir, living in Boston, a chemist by training, is preparing to pick up his wife from a prison in upstate New York. He he hasn’t visited his wife in a year or so.
The prison’s waiting room was cold and hollow. Prabir tightened his muffler around his neck. Since meeting his wife thirty-three years earlier, his life had been about crouching and flopping miserably on shredded institutional upholstery. Immigration, hospitals, state institutions, police stations, prison wards in which he might sit for hours and watch his skin glow green.
Their son, Neal, working at a hardware store in New York City, is an artist, a ‘painter,’ per his parents. Hopefully, he’s not painting walls, says each parent, independently, at different points in the book (neither time did it feel like a joke). Neal has a lot of fears, of a lot of things, some that cannot be mentioned, like a “c——.”
Neal had missed his mother terribly when she first left for prison and in the intervening years his visits had reduced, not because he did not want to see her but because he feared he could be killed; so much of the journey was spent waiting in places that were just short of empty, barren enough to be dangerous.
Nina, Anna and Prabir’s daughter, their eldest child, is a globe-trotting architect living in Montreal (after years in Paris) and is in the process of kicking out her live-in partner. She wants him gone by the time she returns from (reluctantly) reuniting with her family at the prison – she’s afraid of what might happen there but also,
…perhaps even more so of her mother herself, who had not done what other mothers did when cross, like refusing to cook…She had managed to kill Nina’s brother and not in secret but in broad view. Rabi had been just eight when he died; Nina was ten years older and spoke mostly through rage and shame; she went back to England for university and tried to reimagine her four years in America as a simple nightmare.
Last, but sadly, not least – because of how much of the book is consumed by him, in Part I we more fully meet Jean-Louis Katz, the aforementioned psychiatrist. He is preparing to move back to Canada, meeting patients and friends to say adieu. Jean-Louis witnessed the ‘event’ in New York City for which Anna had been imprisoned – he was on the train that Anna pushed her wheelchair-bound son in front of before jumping in front of it herself.
Prabir reaches the prison first. Told by prison officials that Anna hasn’t been in the prison for almost a year, and is on parole in another state, Prabir loses it. Nina and Neal, who haven’t met or talked in some years, hear their father shouting and learn their mother is ‘missing.’ As they leave the prison to figure out what happens next, in a farcical twist, Nina hits Neal with her car backing out of a parking space. After Neal is released from the hospital, the three have dinner and then go their separate ways.
I don’t remember much more of Part I – there was a lot about Jean-Louis, his French friends, his mother’s last letter to him, etc., etc. By this point I didn’t care about him, his mother or B.X. Roy’s footnotes, or want to know more about Nina, Neal and Prabir. I wanted to know Anna’s story, how she ended up in Nebraska, what happened before, on and after that day in 1992.
Instead, frustratingly, there are thousands of words to wade through; so many names – lovers, ex-lovers, roommates, parents of friends, neighbors, colleagues, relatives – Indian, Canadian, French, Nebraskan. There are sentences that seem to be missing words; there is a good amount of French without translation (most of it is US junior high school-level French, though). Because Prabir is a chemist, hundreds of words are devoted to petrochemical this and that and his mostly unsuccessful career as a research professor. Nina is an architect so there are long, long detours through the history and geography of architecture, architectural techniques and architects. There are labs, hospitals, institutions and other such places, so many places. The time and location shifts are not ‘dizzying’ as a blurb on the back cover says – they are annoying. On one page you can be in three different decades and countries – an example, which I remember probably because I was more engaged when ‘India’ featured in the prose – Nina goes to Delhi for work (present-day); at the top of the page she recalls a prison visit with her mother in New York (a decade earlier?), where her mother is telling her about when she (Anna) was taken for a pre-wedding ritual to the Ganges River (20 years earlier?) and then, three paragraphs later, it’s again present-day – Nina’s workmate is watching a video of a collapsed bridge in Kolkata. How any of this adds to the story, I don’t know.
Anna’s story? Except for a few pages after Part I, finally, halfway into the book, told from each family member’s (or Jean-Louis’) perspective, we learn what happened that awful day and in the weeks after. Neal is sure the world is ending that day, worried he won’t be one of the Chosen Ones to ascend to heaven; Nina is focused on her academic future, not boys. Jean-Louis is excited about running in the New York City marathon, flying in from France just to participate, Prabir is drinking his morning tea and preparing to go to work; Anna is going through her (almost) normal daily routine one last time.
Compared to the rest of the book, this section and the next chapter, formatted as the transcript of Jean-Louis’ testimony about the train collision, are crisp. Soon, though, we’re again going back and forth over decades and between continents, with more Jean-Louis. There are some details about Anna and her life in rural Nebraska with the Gubruds – walking dogs, milking cows, driving trucks, learning to shoot, gardening, laundry, cleaning house, the condescension and racism. Per her parole terms Anna is required to travel on missions to tell the gathered how the Gubruds changed her life. Reverend Gubrud, in turn, introduces their daughter Anna, from India, a ‘fine’ but mostly ‘heathen’ land.
There is nearly no sinner in the room who has done worse that Anna as a young woman, and so it is she who most needs our home, our love, our shelter.
The other memorable prose in the section (for this North Dakotan) is Anna’s rather harsh assessment of the Dakotas:
They were so stark, the Dakotas, different from Nebraska, casting shadows she had not seen since New York..the Badlands, mashed together like generations of muscle, which they were, of course. They undulated unnaturally. There were badlands not far from where she had grown up in Madhya Pradesh: the Chambal, with the same ravines and canyons for bandits to kill and corner…The Dakotas were bare of everything; the red hollows made a home in the body between bones.
I did read through to the end of the book but had lost interest in the story and the characters, a mostly miserable lot. There are connections between the Chatterjees and Jean-Louis and Paulette (his mother) – of which it seems only Anna and Prabir are unaware: Jean-Louis witnessed the accident and knew Nina, who lived in Paris and worked for an architect Jean-Louis treated for years; Jean-Louis also treated Neal after his mother was imprisoned; when Paulette learns her son witnessed a mother-son murder-suicide, she interviews Anna in prison hoping to gather material for a book she’s writing on filicide; Prabir, oddly, is fascinated by Paulette’s books and thrilled to run into her in a bookshop; if I recall correctly, Neal has also met Paulette. I think. It’s mostly a blur now.
Datta says Nebraska was written and researched over twenty years (and “will always be in progress”). My first thought reading this was, she didn’t keep good notes and lost track of people, places and years. Probably not. I think Datta’s writing brain is wired differently. I mean, when after the last page of the epilogue, one (this reader) needs to go back to the first page of the prologue to figure out who this footnote-obsessed B.X. Roy is and why does he dislike Jean-Louis so much and why was his character even necessary – it’s not the author’s fault, it has to be ‘me.’
My own epilogue: I read the eBook edition of Nebraska but saw the print edition at a bookstore recently. I wanted to see what the numerous and lengthy footnotes looked like in print – they were a little funky in digital format, all listed at the end of each chapter. In print, uff – sometimes they take up half of a page.
[1] While Nebraska is not a particularly heavy or large, I had to chuckle at one of the blurbs on the back jacket cover: “A Masterful, Time-spanning Doorstopper”
[2] The author, in her acknowledgments, says she named the book after Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska. This seems to be one of Springsteen’s more dark releases, per the results of a cursory online search, which also indicated the album includes songs of desperate characters who commit brutal murders. Now, I’m no B.X. Roy but…coincidence?
Nebraska
Monica Datta
Astra House, 2026.
Great review! I also got thoroughly bored with Jean-Louis and his mother and started speed-reading those parts. I’ve seen the book described as ‘meandering’, and I was thinking that’s an understatement 🙂
There are lovely passages, though, but as you say, all too short before we’re rushed off backwards by a decade or forwards into Shanghai with another character.