BOOKS: ‘Atlas of Unknowns’

ATLAS OF UNKNOWNS
By Tania James
Knopf, $24.95, 336 pages
REVIEWED BY CLAIRE HOPLEY

Tania James brings a dazzling array of writerly skills to her debut novel “Atlas of Unknowns.” She keeps a tight rein on her plot yet never yanks her characters so much that they cannot show their paces; they canter off her pages with all the spriteliness of their own personalities. Ms. James has a tender heart that feels for their idiosyncrasies and yearnings, a sharp ear for dialogue, and an eye for the details of landscape and setting. Her novel is set in two countries — India and the United States — and her rarest talent is a sense of the serious and ludicrous in both of them. This gives her tale, which has much of sadness and tragedy, an affecting humor and a singular sweetness.

At the center of the novel are two sisters, Anju and Linno. Anju lunges for everything she can grasp, most significantly when the Sitwell School of New York offers a scholarship to a high-school student from Anju’s state of Kerala. Anju is a super-achiever and becomes one of the 10 finalists. When asked what makes her a cut above the other nine contestants, her eye falls on her sister’s sketchbook. In a heartbeat, she hands it over as if it were her own. Linno’s talented drawings do the trick: Anju gets the scholarship.

In New York, Anju lives with an affluent Indian family, which includes Sonia Solanki, a talk-show host, and her son Rohit, a Princeton dropout permanently attached to his video camera because he fancies he’s a documentary filmmaker. The Solanki’s life-style amazes Anju. The school is equally startling. True to form, she does very well, but she is hag-ridden by that sketchbook. Encouraged to draw and even enter an art show, she resorts to researching problems of the wrist, then ties her hand up in an Ace bandage, explaining that she has juvenile arthritis and so cannot draw. When her deception is uncovered, she is expelled. She flees the Solankis’ and ends up living with Bird, an Indian she met, apparently fortuitously, in the library. Bird gets her a job in an Indian beauty salon, where she learns waxing and tries desperately to save enough money to apply for a green card. Every immigrant wants one of them. Don’t they?

Back in Kerala, Linno in her quieter way proves equally capable of lunging for what she wants. As a child, she reached for a half-spent firework. It exploded in her hand, which had to be amputated. Determinedly she learned to draw with the other one — hence her lovely sketchbook. When Anju passes it off as her own, Linno neither reveals nor condones the deception. Left behind, she meets a woman who recognizes her talent, and soon they are running a successful business producing elaborate invitations to weddings and parties.

With Anju lost — she doesn’t contact her family after she flees the Solankis’, aiming instead for the elusive green card, which will theoretically get them all to America — Linno tries to get a visa of her own so she can search for her. In desperation at her failure, she goes to confession to reveal how her mother Gracie died — a secret she has kept hidden for 14 years. The dead Gracie is the hub on which the novel turns. Her husband, Melvin ,had believed that theirs was a love marriage, realizing the truth only shortly before her death. Her friend Bird had already gone to America, hoping all the time that Gracie would bring her family and join her. Neither Melvin nor Bird have ever stopped grieving for Gracie; nor has Linno. But nobody tells their grief.

Indeed, nobody tells much in this novel. With each character living in their own inner world, full of secrets and aspirations and pain, their inner lives are known to the reader, but not to each other. “The Atlas of Unknowns” reveals the people and events and secrets that link the unknown to the known. Most poignantly, Ms. James suggests how little her characters know about the thoughts and demons of those they love most. Melvin lives in a world of physical and mental pain — all deriving from the past and his sense of failure. Anju and Linno are the closest of sisters, but each has her separate world. They love their father and he adores them, but in some ways they are mysteries to each other. More comically, the Solankis are mystified by their son Rohit.

A generation earlier, both Bird and Gracie are disconnected from their parents, partly because of the traditions that gave them so much control of children, especially daughters. Ms. James does not belabor the parent-and-child theme. Rather she presents secrets, hidden yearnings and sad regrets as the burden everyone carries. They can be relieved by breaking silence, but still, as her characters show, everyone lives in a private world. The glory of the novel in general and this one in particular, is that as readers we can discover the secrets of all hearts, and through this learn that trying to organize other people’s lives is a kind of thievery. Another lesser revelation in “Atlas of Unknowns” is that while green cards are an enticing and elusive goal for many immigrants, the world has many places, such as Kerala, where people wish to be. Like all good atlases, this one includes them all and treats them respectfully.

• Claire Hopley is a writer and critic in Amherst, Mass.