Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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Maroo is deeply in tune with the sensory experiences of being on the court, from the sound of a ball ricocheting off the wall of an adjacent court to the “soft throbbing” through a player’s body when playing and hitting well . . . The lingering power of Maroo’s novel is the way she depicts the possibility that on the court, there is the chance to find some modicum of grace, however temporary. How to measure this against, say, the arrowlike flight of Maroo’s sentences aiming at the heart? I don’t envy the judges. Where they have by and large selected novels that show an uncomplicated faith in the pleasure of storytelling, Bernstein’s is the book that makes narrative a problem – the reader’s problem, some might say. But it just might be declared best on 26 November by judges who can’t be expected to spend a year agreeing with one another about how great The Bee Sting is.

It’s because of this that I wonder if Prophet Song will get the nod – or Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience (Granta). A Canadian living in Scotland, listed this year as one of Granta’s best young British novelists, she is also winner of Canada’s prestigious Scotiabank Giller prize (twice won by Edugyan). Study for Obedience has nagged me since I read it in March. I didn’t like it then and I don’t love it now but in a list of novels about family it stands apart – an almost spectrally vague existential brainteaser soaked in 20th-century bloodshed. I can’t tell you what the novel is about, exactly, and that’s why I think it bears scrutiny. Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn’t know anything else, and hadto write that sort of novel . . . It’s feels wonderful. It’s an honour. It’s humbling to see Western Lane amongst all the books that have been longlisted in the history of the prize. I’m still taking that in. The winner receives GBP 50,000 and a trophy named 'Iris' in honour of the 1978 Booker Prize-winning Irish-British author Iris Murdoch.Then, due to the fact the protagonist/narrator is an eleven-year-old Anglo-Indian girl, the prose is purposefully flat and unadorned. It reads just slightly more elevated than an elementary school reader - more reportage than anything. So I found much of the story plodding, due to the mundane style. Others have praised the view it gave into Indian family dynamics, but I have read such a plethora of Southeast Asian literature that it didn't seem necessarily novel or fresh to me. After the death of the family’s mother, the children and Pa channel their grief, unusually, into squash. What is it about this sport, and the act of this game in particular that allows them to process their mother’s death? Without this, how might they have dealt with the tragedy?

Given the familiar storyline presented, The Guardian's Caleb Klaces noted that readers "might expect Western Lane to feel formulaic, but it doesn’t. It feels like the work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it." [5] When the wedding had first been announced, Duniya had cried and, later, demanded, “Why marry when you don’t want to?” Geeta had looked unhappy at the question. She’d been sitting on Oma’s bed with Oma’s new walking boots in her lap, threading the laces in, though Oma could have done it herself. “I do want to,” Geeta had replied, and Duniya went and sat next to her and said, “Okay.” Geeta kept lacing. Then she put one boot down on the carpet and said, “You’ll understand when it’s your turn.” Rakhi shot Duniya the same glance she used when they were cross-examining their parents, but Duniya refused to meet it, and since it was impossible for the sisters to imagine themselves at twenty-two without a vague, unsettling sense of their own absence, they each turned away and occupied themselves with other thoughts.Gopi is the narrator of Western Lane. She is 11, and the youngest of three siblings, all girls. Gopi is shy and lives in the shadows of the family. She is incredibly close to her sisters, and often mirrors her sister, Khush, out of adoration. Gopi is a natural and talented squash player, and with the mentorship of her father, begins to succeed at the game. Maroo masterfully writes from the perspective of a grieving pre-teen in 1980s England. Gopi is wise beyond her years, as the youngest in a family just trying to make it after a devastating loss. It's through her narration and observations that we come to know the members of her family, immediate and extended, as well as fellow squash players at Western Lane, the facility near their house at which they play. It is a vivid period in Gopi’s and her sisters’ lives. They have no idea what will happen to them, or how the family will reassert itself, and they deal with this in different ways. Rather than being a book full of twists and turns, Western Lane holds its gaze unflinchingly on people who are figuring out how to continue living together. In a strange way, those scenes evoked for me the long takes of David Lynch’s 2017 iteration of Twin Peaks.

Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is about a young woman who travels to an unspecified remote northern country to be housekeeper for her brother. Judges thought the book was a “stirring meditation on survival and a pointed critique of the demonisation of the outsider”. a b "Chetna Maroo Wins This Year's Plimpton Prize". The Paris Review. 2022-03-09 . Retrieved 2023-09-23.

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An unforgettable coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel is a moving exploration of the closeness of sisterhood, the immigrant experience, and the collective overcoming of grief.