The title of Anjali Joseph's second novel, following her prize-winning Saraswati Park, inevitably suggests previous works with the same title: James Baldwin's Another Country, a novel set in New York's Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and Julian Mitchell's play, which became a 1984 film. Both Baldwin and Mitchell focused on the state of being an outsider figuratively inhabiting another country within one's official nation. Baldwin's outsiders are proscribed by racist prejudice; Mitchell's are homosexuals and Marxists, who fail to conform to the rigid mores of the British establishment in the 1930s.
Joseph (pictured) offers a very different take on this motif. Her Another Country describes the recent past of a self-described "middle-class" Indian girl, Leela Ghosh, who spent her affluent, "selfish" 20s in Paris, London and Bombay, in the company of other equally affluent and selfish 20somethings of various races and nationalities. Leela is never quite at home in any of these cities; her friends are equally deracinated and peripatetic. In each place Leela falls in love, or thereabouts with Simon in Paris, Richard in London, Vikram in Bombay. She goes to parties, to the pub, the gym, she commutes to dull jobs that are of little consequence, she waits for the evening to begin.
Conversations idle gently, for the most part: '"Is it weird to have a kir after drinking whisky?' He looked down at her, amused. 'Not if you want to."' Or, "'How was the evening?' 'Really nice actually.' 'Really?' 'Yeah, I really liked him.' 'Really?' 'He's great.' 'You really liked him, didn't you?' 'Yeah.'" Leela's stream of consciousness is similar in tone: "His hairy wrists and dark eyes Roger strange name was no doubt passionately artistic." There are also precise descriptions of everyday activities "He ate half a sandwich, in sunflower-seed bread" and astute observations of place: "trees, impressive shops, and cast-iron-fenced square gardens in which elderly men sat on wooden benches looking, themselves, like overstuffed pieces of furniture".
Misery and unease do, occasionally, intrude: a drunk on the Paris Métro, spitting out racist abuse, or the reluctance of Leela's London boyfriend Richard to tell his father about their relationship. Yet Leela and her friends contend more usually with mild crises of social embarrassment an awkward tryst, an overbearing prospective mother-in-law than with oppression or existential angst. These clever, highly educated young people are optimistic and sanguine; they rarely linger on themes of futility, death, dissolution, the unfairness of wider society, or the ineffable strangeness of life on Earth. Leela is one of the most even-tempered protagonists I've ever come across. I kept expecting her to riot, drink herself into a stupor, or run naked down the street just once. Then I wondered how far Joseph would take her characters if she would eventually conscript them into vicious multinational corporations, show them struggling to rear children. But she leaves them as fundamentally young, free and single as they began.
Perhaps this is the point. Joseph's concerns are so remote from Mitchell and Baldwin that I wondered, in the end, if her "another country" is really the contented middle class. If not overtly iconoclastic, this is at least a wry gesture, in today's literary climate. One of the basic rules in contemporary fiction is that if you describe middle-class characters who fail to combine murder/trauma/incest with their bourgeois lives, your publishers will behave as if you've sent them a piece of hardcore pornography. (They might even prefer hardcore pornography.) Joseph's first novel was repeatedly described as "bittersweet" a rather patronising epithet sometimes used by white reviewers when discussing non-white writers, as if the experience of ethnic minorities, whatever their circumstances, must always have bitterness inherent in it. What if, Joseph seems to be saying, Leela's middle-class youth is no more "bittersweet" than that of her white contemporaries? What if it is mostly sweet? It is a pertinent question, posed in a readable and entertaining book.
Joanna Kavenna's Come to the Edge is published by Quercus.
