"Untitled"

I have for the past several weeks been at work on my next novel. When I say `at work' I mean it in the broadest sense: I have written only about twenty pages or so of actual prose, but have in the process managed to create (partly on paper, mostly in my mind) five characters whose personalities will define and (hopefully) propel the novel. We have Leela, the Indian protagonist, a curious and empathetic girl whose recent arrival in the US begins to change her in immediate, unprecedented ways, and as the novel opens we see her agreeing to 'go out' with a guy she has known only for minutes. Later the same day she meets Victoria, an aspiring televangelist who convinces her to attend a meeting of pastoral caregivers; she also meets Gary, her husband, who tells her about his work at a construction company. Gary, we know, is a troubled man. After having lost his job as a plumber a year ago, he took to drink and now spends his weekends in AA and (of course, at his wife's prompting), at pastoral care. He also appears to be conducting an affair with Tina, a 30-something professional whose career at a law firm contrasts with her passion for Japanese flower arrangement. Tina is half-Indian (her mother Anu, who died when Tina was ten, came to the US as a graduate student from Bangalore nearly fifty years ago), a fact that Gary is unaware of and quite likely to have a problem with, as Gary does not like Indians.

The novel (at first entitled Expatriate, when I began writing it in August, but now tentatively changed to Untitled) will be written entirely in the first person, with a different style for each major character. This is based partly on my reaction to my own writing style (if such a thing could be said to exist); barren, literal and (because of its register) almost devoid of emotional impact, it cannot be wielded with any degree of conviction without also distancing the writer from the subject matter. Style, as I have noted elsewhere, must always elevate the content, and of course it cannot hope to do so if it remains severed from it. Style is frequently ignored by the tyro writer because he feels that he is not being `himself' unless he's writing in the only way he can. What may at this point liberate him is the awareness that each of the many aspects of his personality possesses a style of its own, and embracing each of these in turn will lead him to a voice that is no more or less true, no more or less himself, than any other. The writer's adoption of a style (in first-person) is in some sense almost like acting : he learns how to lend gravity to what is at first only an idea on a piece of paper. The manner in which he chooses to do so is unique to himself and therefore also becomes a form of expression.

The other reason for my choosing to adopt different styles has much to do with my three primary influences : Ishiguro (for his entire oeuvre, and especially for The Unconsoled and The Remains of the Day), (David) Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, of course, as well as Black Swan Green and to a lesser extent Ghostwritten), and Murdoch (primarily for The Black Prince, whose Bradley Pearson speaks exactly in the semi-colon infused lofty register that I adopt almost throughout this blog, as well as The Sea, The Sea). These authors have in some sense channeled my development as a writer as well as a person, and it is with their works I feel an all-pervading harmony that I can only express through art. It was when I read Cloud Atlas, for example (in 2004, when I was about seventy or so pages into my first novel), that I realized that I wanted to be not merely an author but a writer; which is to say that I knew I could not be content with simply publishing my book. In fact, my first reaction to Cloud Atlas was one of pure ego; I felt challenged by what it represented, which was so much more than my aspirations then led me to believe I could be. My interpretation of Cloud Atlas led me to confront myself, and make an attempt at changing parts of me that were in most need of change. Change has of course been a feature of these past few years, almost in some sense a theme; and if there are authors that mediate this theme, then they would most likely be Ishiguro, Mitchell and Murdoch, in that order.

Returning to the novel: it will be written mostly in the past tense, with large swatches of (mostly conversational) prose in the present tense. The themes of longing and alienation in a foreign country will no doubt be explored in some depth, but also present will be patterns of subjectivity, of the absence of feeling, and of aloneness (which in many ways is in opposition with loneliness). There will also be an attempt to examine the role of writing in the lives of people; I have felt for some time now that writing is not a `natural' form of expression, as measured by the number of people who choose to write as opposed to (say) play music. Exactly why this may be true is something that I want to understand through this novel. Certainly at least one aspect of this has to do with the fact that a writer cannot afford to indulge his spontaneity, because most of his spontaneity emerges from his knowledge of the language from a purely conversational context and is therefore necessarily everyday. Prose is a manufactured form of art; that this does not detract from its artistic features is apparent only upon reading a great novel or (preferably) many such.

At this point I do not know if I have bitten off more than I can chew. I have only the vestiges of a voice for each of my characters (indeed, one of them is only about five sentences long), and whether I shall be able to perpetuate this voice throughout a medium sized novel is a question that can only be answered after many frustrating sessions in a room whose doors are bolted from the outside. Besides, there is also the question of whether at the end of it all it will just seem as if a huge gimmick; whether keeping it `simple' is not the best way to go about it, and whether if any of this represents the `truth' -- I have always been chary of my artistic propensities, always suspicious of its leadings. For me, then, this is a more uncertain time than most; I am sustained however by the fact that this represents a new direction, one that is laden with possibility and the promise of color.