London: It’s nine years now since Hari Kunzru came to prominence via his formidable debut, The Impressionist.
He arrived in the wake of Zadie Smith, and that first novel was characteristic of its time, determined to impress the reader with its teeming parade of post-colonial fictive ideas.
In 2000, two years before The Impressionist was published, James Wood coined the term “hysterical realism” to describe the type of book that, he said, Smith had made fashionable. He meant a fiction that was manic, overpopulated, filled with news of the culture, driven forward, often, by strained plot coincidence.
Smith famously conceded that this was an accurate diagnosis when it came to the imperfect nature of White Teeth. Few, surely, would argue with the idea that The Impressionist – though clearly the work of an important new writer – shared those imperfections.
How gratifying, then, to watch Kunzru evolve over the past decade into a writer who retains the energy that carried The Impressionist along, but combines it with more subtle virtues: psychological acuity, a wonderful linguistic precision and the ability to make beautiful accordance between form and content via thoughtful narrative experiment.
Gods Without Men is a step further along the road towards the full realisation of Kunzru’s early promise. It makes undeniable the claim that he is one of our most important novelists.
The novel presents a series of linked narratives which all have a connection to a rock formation called the Pinnacles in the Mojave desert, California. There is Schmidt, a former World War II aircraft engineer who escapes into the desert and sets up base at the Pinnacles, waiting for contact with extra-terrestrials.
Fast-forward to 2008, and we find Nicky, a British rock star stranded in air-conditioned California hotel rooms, failing to make a new record. Rewind back to 1778, and we are party to a letter sent to his superior by Spanish official Juan Arnulfo, to report on the missionary work of a Padre Franciso Garces.
The central story, though, is set in 2008: that of Indian-American Jas and his Jewish-American wife, Lisa. When they take a holiday in the desert to repair a marriage that is fraying at the edges, their autistic son Raj goes missing, sparking a manhunt on a national scale. Here, then, is the novel’s centre of gravity: deftly, Kunzru fixes Raj’s absence as the strange black hole around which his other narratives swirl haphazardly, temporarily coming into view only to recede again a few pages later.
Kunzru is at his best in the parts of the novel depicting Jas’s isolating, achievement-obsessed Sikh childhood, his marriage to Lisa made against the wishes of his parents and the marital strain caused by Raj. Here he writes with such closeness and acuity that some passages are as large and cruel and real as life.
As in so much of Kunzru’s work, personal identity – how it is made and what it implies – is the disputed territory here. The difference between Jas and Lisa’s respective backgrounds is a fault line teased open by the difficulty of parenting Raj.
Other narrative strands don’t always manage the same compelling truthfulness. Some, such as the story of a young, female Iraqi refugee who earns a living by acting in US military simulations, better serve Kunzru’s desire to write about events (in this case the Iraq War) than they do the novel. But Gods Without Men is never less than entertaining, and the harmonies that Kunzru establishes between his narrative strands are effective and satisfying.
Given its structure – multiple, intersecting strands – Gods Without Men is bound to be compared with another well-known contemporary example of that narrative technique: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. But while intertextuality and the instability of meaning were the anxieties that underpinned Mitchell’s novel, Kunzru is more concerned with the instability of personal identity; the contingent, changeable essence that makes us who we are.
Crucially, a spectral presence haunts this book: the anthropomorphised Coyote of Native American myth. As in the many Coyote legends, the desert in Kunzru’s novel is a place for self-creation, for renewal, for ends and beginnings; a place where the Coyote’s paradoxical, dual nature – foolish and wise, tricky and naive, good and evil – are a matter of survival. Such is life; such are we. And such is the message delivered obliquely, and beautifully, by this novel. – The Independent on Sunday