Sunday, June 12, 2011

Hari Kunzru, Transmission (2005)

There's such a focus on anxiety in contemporary novels. The Corrections comes to mind, and Infinite Jest - which is about a lot of other things too, but man, is there some anxiety in that book, especially in the first chapter. Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk is pretty anxious. Another common theme of recent novels is satire of a caricaturish kind: The Russian Debutante's Handbook comes to mind, The Corrections again, Zadie Smith's On Beauty or White Teeth and lots and lots of New Yorker short stories (some of them by the authors of the books just mentioned, which might seem like it doesn't count, but it adds to the subjective feeling of the pervasiveness of this kind of writing, which I grow tired of). None of these are among my favourite books (actually I haven't finished The Corrections and don't want to pre-judge, but so far it's given me a similar feeling to the others: interesting enough to go on with, but not moving). For the first hundred or two pages of Infinite Jest, I was feeling emotionally connected, but in the subsequent 800 pages flagged a little.

Transmission shares both of these contemporary preoccupations, and, as with the others, I thought at first that it might be great, then thought good. It is good, and readable, and interesting. It's about computer hacking and virus creation, ramifications of the economics of globalization, adult virgins and Bollywood.

From the first, it put me on guard that the anxiety might be coming. We meet Arjun Mehta, an innocent whose glasses are "blurred with fingerprints." He is going for a job interview, and is brought to "a waiting room filled with nervous young people sitting on orange plastic chairs with the peculiar, self-isolating stiffness interview candidates share with criminal defendants and people in STD-clinic reception areas." I was slightly hopeful that he might turn out to be an agent, and not a painful victim of circumstance, by this detail:
Above [the receptionist] a row of clocks, relics of the optimistic 1960s, displayed the time in key world cities. New Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one behind Tokyo. Automatically Arjun found himself calculating the shrinkage in the world implied by this error, but, lacking even a best estimate for certain of the variables, his thoughts trailed away.
And he is a bit of an agent, but not generally enough to get out of the clutches of the big bad world (is that saying too much? I try not to reveal anything, but that's a bit difficult). But at the same time, it's nice writing. I think it gets a bit rushed and slightly less artful later on, but no, it's technically pretty good throughout -- all those other aforementioned books also show good technique, resolving for me a question I had as a teenager about whether great craft was enough to make great literature.

This is an example of the slightly overdone satire that makes me wince:
Guy had known even before he moved in that this was a living space that would require something extraordinary. Feeling both time- and knowledge-challenged, he had (at the suggestion of the attractive brunette property consultant) employed an agency to help him buy furniture. That way, he reasoned, he could be certain everything about his personal environment was in the best possible taste. And so the white-leather table with the cut-out airport city code motif [...] and the low-rise smuggled-teak patio furniture on the balcony; all of it was personalized, individual, signature. It was all--every sandlblasted bathroom faucet of it--him.
It's predictable. Mostly the plot is not so predictable and is nicely paced. It disappointed me a little though, I was expecting more from the twin storylines of Arjun and Guy, based on some clues dropped in middle chapters.

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