#BookReview: THE AMERICANS by Chitra Viraraghavan

At first, The Americans seems very disjointed. There are a lot of characters to keep up with and each has their own intricate story line. It’s almost enough to make you quit if you have a short attention span, but stay with it. I promise you, it’ll be worth it.

The connector of everyone is Tara, so it makes sense that she’s the biggest focus of the book. In her mid-30s, she’s come from India to the U.S. to help her sister Kamala out. On her flight, she meets CLN, a fellow Indian, traveling to the U.S. for the first time to see his daughter, Kavita, and meet his grandson in person. While Kamala takes her autistic son, Rahul, to see a specialist, Tara is to stay with her temperamental niece, Lavi. Ariel, Kamala’s Israeli housekeeper, has a better grasp on what’s going on in Kamala’s house than anyone else, but doesn’t interfere, only observes. This makes up the core group of characters, but there’s a sub-group that’s just as interesting.

Shantanu, a friend of Tara’s from back home, works at the Royal Bengal Tiger restaurant in the Little India area of Los Angeles. He’s always suspected that his boss, Nagi Babu, is trafficking immigrants, but takes action when he realizes that Babu has moved into sex trafficking young girls.

Akhil, another friend of Tara’s from India, works at a university, but runs a conspiracy theory website on the side. At first Akhil seems level headed, but watching his descent into madness is painful. I can’t quite decide if he was just overly paranoid or was dealing with deeper mental issues like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Madulika is Tara’s best friend. She’s married to Vinod, who is cheating on her with a white American who is pregnant by him. Madulika is obsessed with having a baby, so much so that she begins taking illegal measures to get one of her own. I found her attitude toward “Mexicans” interesting. She lumped a whole population of people into that group because she couldn’t be bothered to learn the differences between ethnicities. At first I thought this was a very Western attitude, but given that India has operated on a caste system for so long, it makes sense. In her mind, she didn’t see them as being on the same level as she was, likely because their skin was darker than hers. So she doesn't feel the need to learn who her "Mexican" housekeepers really are, they don't matter to her.

What stood out to me most about The Americans is no one seemed really happy. Kavita has a very short temper and always seems irritated by everything CLN does, almost like she doesn’t want him there. But CLN comments that Tara reminds him of a younger Kavita. And Tara is a kind person, so does this mean that America has turned Kavita into the person she’s become?
Kamala is obsessed with being perfect and, since Rahul’s autism doesn’t fit into her plan, she ignores Lavi while trying to “fix” him. She’s selfish and self-centered, yet doesn’t realize it until Lavi points out to her that she asked Tara to come all the way from India to stay with her, but she would never do the same for Tara.

Ariel is happy in her job at Kamala’s until she’s accused of stealing. Then her world seems to crumble and she realizes that her white American husband is lazy and she can’t stand her mother-in-law. When we find her contemplating whether or not to stay in Tel Aviv when she visits her daughter, it’s easy to believe that she might leave America and never come back, because what is she really coming back to?

I can’t say that America transformed these people, but you have to wonder if they would have been this way in India or Israel. Kamala and CLN both make comments that lead me to think it has. At one point Kamala comments that wished she could go home to India where people were treated as humans and stood by each other. CLN says that in India people are happy being independent, but know that they are connected to a larger community; in the U.S., there’s a sense of isolation. So maybe it’s the lack of a support system and a lack of humanity that has so many of the characters on edge. And maybe Tara has kept her softness, her humanity, because even though she’s lived in the U.S. in the past, she’s been living in India and has had time to recharge her batteries, to regain her humanity.

296 p.
Disclaimer: Copy of book provided by publisher, opinions are my own.

New Books Coming Your Way Aug. 4, 2015 (from Chitra Viraraghavan, Liu Zhenyun & Iceberg Slim)

The Americans by Chitra Viraraghavan
296 p.
Publication date: August 4, 2015

The protagonist of the book is Tara, a single Indian woman in her mid-thirties who travels to America to look after her teenage niece while her sister Kamala is dealing with her autistic son’s treatment and issues at school. But theirs is just one story of many. Woven expertly together, The Americans tells the stories of eleven people whose lives span the country from Louisville to Chicago to Los Angeles to Portland, to Boston. And all of their stories connect back to Tara. The Americans is about a group of people who have come to the United States with the hope of a better life, and find out what it means to have arrived here and not fit in. For fan of Jhumpa Lhairi’s Interpreter of Maladies and Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, The Americans is an eloquent and heart-warming debut from an exciting new voice that brings up questions of race, ethnicity and point of origin, and explores the puzzles of identity, place and human connection.

The Cook, the Crook and the Real Estate Tycoon by Liu Zhenyun
288 p.
Publication date: August 4, 2015

Here's a new one from Liu Zhenyun, author of I Did Not Kill My Husband. The protagonist, Liu Yuejin, is a work site cook and small-time thief whose bag is stolen. In searching for it he stumbles upon another bag, which contains a flash disk that chronicles high-level corruption, and sets off a convoluted chase. There are no heroes in this scathing, complex, and highly readable critique of the dark side of China’s predatory capitalism, corruption, and the plight of the underclasses.

Shetani's Sister by Iceberg Slim
256 p.
Publication date: August 4, 2015

Here is the newly discovered novel by Iceberg Slim, the creator and undisputed master of African-American “street literature,” a man who profoundly influenced hip hop and rap culture and probably has sold more books than any other black American author of the twentieth century (not that he saw the royalties from those sales). In many ways Iceberg Slim’s most mature fictional work, Shetani’s Sister relates, in taut, evocative vernacular torn straight from the street corner, the deadly duel between two complex anitheroes: Sergeant Russell Rucker, an LAPD vice detective attempting to clean up street prostitution and police corruption, and Shetani (Swahili for Satan), a veteran master pimp who controls his stable of whores with violence and daily doses of heroin.