"The reason they call it the American dream,” the comedian George Carlin once quipped, “is because you have to be asleep to believe in it.” In recent years, narratives of American immigrant life have taken a turn for the grim. Novelists such as Joseph O’Neill, Jhumpa Lahiri and Aleksandar Hemon depict the pursuit of the American dream as precarious and even illusory. Akhil Sharma’s autobiographical novel Family Life and Gary Shteyngart’s memoir Little Failure take up this theme from the perspective of the immigrant child, with moving and, in the case of Sharma, tragic consequences.
The parallels between the two stories are uncanny. Both Sharma and Shteyngart were born in the early 1970s, and both families left their deprived socialist home countries (India and the USSR) for the Mecca of consumerist capitalism, New York, in 1979. The Brahmin Sharmas and the Jewish Shteyngarts expected their sons to achieve the American Dream through academic success, and initially, they complied: Shteyngart was admitted to one of New York's three elite public schools, Stuyvesant, while Sharma’s older brother got into another, Bronx Science. At this point, the families’ paths diverge, and the nature of the divergence leads to two profoundly different books – although both books are, ultimately, an account of how Sharma and Shteyngart came to be writers.
As Sharma has emphasised in op-eds and interviews, the Mishras of Family Life are a lightly fictionalised version of his own family with a narrator, Ajay Mishra, based on Sharma himself. At the age of 14, Birju Mishra, the narrator’s older brother, has an accident in a swimming pool that leaves him blind and permanently brain damaged. The novel describes the impact of the accident, and of caring for Birju, on the Mishras. Sharma spent 13 years perfecting this 200-page book, and the years of revision show up in the writing, which is taut and clear. The narrator recounts his adolescent discovery of Hemingway, and while Sharma’s prose is quiet rather than muscular, his brief sentences and simple vocabulary speak to this inheritance. This is more than a matter of aesthetics: the prose is intended to approximate the voice of a child, and presumably to convey trauma and grief without sentimental melodrama.
Sharma’s account of a family utterly unable to grieve in a redemptive way is poignant, so much so that it is sometimes physically difficult to read. The book’s emotional power lies in its subtle, but ultimately heartbreaking description of the ways in which Ajay Mishra’s soul is maimed by his brother’s accident. Family Life is reminiscent of Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir of losing her family to the Indian Ocean tsunami, in its unflinching willingness to unsettle and discomfit the reader. Sharma’s greatest strength is that he has no fear of unpleasantness. But his ruthless self-editing has produced a constricted novel. Characters outside the family are thinly drawn, typically represented by a single detail. Too often, Sharma suppresses complexity through cultural generalisations – Indians in this novel are monolithic. It is generally a tribute to say that a novel ought to have been longer, but Family Life would have been richer for more detail and less compression.
Little Failure, by glorious contrast, is a work of excess and surplus. Shteyngart’s first-person voice is pitched midway between Roth’s Alexander Portnoy and Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai: self-conscious, sometimes hyperbolic, inventive, and full of comedy, Jewish and otherwise. To be sure, he can get away with this because the story, while full of anxiety and pathos, is not really tragic. The tragedy in Shteyngart’s memoir is the suffering of his ancestors at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, 30 years before his own birth. Moving back and forth from the present day to his Soviet childhood to the 1940s, Shteyngart demonstrates that the memoir form can be just as, if not more vivid, malleable and satisfying as the novel.
Oddly enough, this Soviet Jewish/immigrant American memoir feels more familiar to an Indian reader than Family Life. Shteyngart’s parents have a tough, sometimes oppressive love for their son, coupled with the ability to say almost anything– the book's title comes from “Failurchka”, the Russian-English nickname his mother gives him. This is a family that rejects American notions of “boundaries” or “personal space”. Shteyngart’s decision to become a writer, as opposed to a lawyer or banker, is a source of undying bemusement to his parents. And a lasting legacy of his upbringing is a tortured relationship to sex.
In reading Sharma’s novel alongside Shteyngart’s memoir, it is natural to reflect upon the difference in forms. In an interview with Mohsin Hamid, Sharma asked that his book be judged “rigorously” as a novel: “The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.” But Family Life has been accompanied by a publicity campaign that makes plain that the novel is almost entirely “true”. Readers will thus be unable to judge it strictly as a novel, and will wonder how the book would have read if written as a memoir, and their emotional reaction will be altered by the knowledge that the events depicted truly happened.
Shteyngart, for his part, has gone over material similar to Little Failure in his three novels. It would be fatuous, of course, to make any sort of generalisation about the merits of novels and memoirs, but the freedom and ease that Shteyngart displays in Little Failure could well be a reflection of his comfort with his choice of form. However, the perfectionist impulse behind wanting Family Life to work as a novel rather than as merely a narrative of what happened to Sharma’s family appears to have been somewhat counter-productive.
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The parallels between the two stories are uncanny. Both Sharma and Shteyngart were born in the early 1970s, and both families left their deprived socialist home countries (India and the USSR) for the Mecca of consumerist capitalism, New York, in 1979. The Brahmin Sharmas and the Jewish Shteyngarts expected their sons to achieve the American Dream through academic success, and initially, they complied: Shteyngart was admitted to one of New York's three elite public schools, Stuyvesant, while Sharma’s older brother got into another, Bronx Science. At this point, the families’ paths diverge, and the nature of the divergence leads to two profoundly different books – although both books are, ultimately, an account of how Sharma and Shteyngart came to be writers.
As Sharma has emphasised in op-eds and interviews, the Mishras of Family Life are a lightly fictionalised version of his own family with a narrator, Ajay Mishra, based on Sharma himself. At the age of 14, Birju Mishra, the narrator’s older brother, has an accident in a swimming pool that leaves him blind and permanently brain damaged. The novel describes the impact of the accident, and of caring for Birju, on the Mishras. Sharma spent 13 years perfecting this 200-page book, and the years of revision show up in the writing, which is taut and clear. The narrator recounts his adolescent discovery of Hemingway, and while Sharma’s prose is quiet rather than muscular, his brief sentences and simple vocabulary speak to this inheritance. This is more than a matter of aesthetics: the prose is intended to approximate the voice of a child, and presumably to convey trauma and grief without sentimental melodrama.
Sharma’s account of a family utterly unable to grieve in a redemptive way is poignant, so much so that it is sometimes physically difficult to read. The book’s emotional power lies in its subtle, but ultimately heartbreaking description of the ways in which Ajay Mishra’s soul is maimed by his brother’s accident. Family Life is reminiscent of Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir of losing her family to the Indian Ocean tsunami, in its unflinching willingness to unsettle and discomfit the reader. Sharma’s greatest strength is that he has no fear of unpleasantness. But his ruthless self-editing has produced a constricted novel. Characters outside the family are thinly drawn, typically represented by a single detail. Too often, Sharma suppresses complexity through cultural generalisations – Indians in this novel are monolithic. It is generally a tribute to say that a novel ought to have been longer, but Family Life would have been richer for more detail and less compression.
Little Failure, by glorious contrast, is a work of excess and surplus. Shteyngart’s first-person voice is pitched midway between Roth’s Alexander Portnoy and Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai: self-conscious, sometimes hyperbolic, inventive, and full of comedy, Jewish and otherwise. To be sure, he can get away with this because the story, while full of anxiety and pathos, is not really tragic. The tragedy in Shteyngart’s memoir is the suffering of his ancestors at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, 30 years before his own birth. Moving back and forth from the present day to his Soviet childhood to the 1940s, Shteyngart demonstrates that the memoir form can be just as, if not more vivid, malleable and satisfying as the novel.
Oddly enough, this Soviet Jewish/immigrant American memoir feels more familiar to an Indian reader than Family Life. Shteyngart’s parents have a tough, sometimes oppressive love for their son, coupled with the ability to say almost anything– the book's title comes from “Failurchka”, the Russian-English nickname his mother gives him. This is a family that rejects American notions of “boundaries” or “personal space”. Shteyngart’s decision to become a writer, as opposed to a lawyer or banker, is a source of undying bemusement to his parents. And a lasting legacy of his upbringing is a tortured relationship to sex.
In reading Sharma’s novel alongside Shteyngart’s memoir, it is natural to reflect upon the difference in forms. In an interview with Mohsin Hamid, Sharma asked that his book be judged “rigorously” as a novel: “The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.” But Family Life has been accompanied by a publicity campaign that makes plain that the novel is almost entirely “true”. Readers will thus be unable to judge it strictly as a novel, and will wonder how the book would have read if written as a memoir, and their emotional reaction will be altered by the knowledge that the events depicted truly happened.
Shteyngart, for his part, has gone over material similar to Little Failure in his three novels. It would be fatuous, of course, to make any sort of generalisation about the merits of novels and memoirs, but the freedom and ease that Shteyngart displays in Little Failure could well be a reflection of his comfort with his choice of form. However, the perfectionist impulse behind wanting Family Life to work as a novel rather than as merely a narrative of what happened to Sharma’s family appears to have been somewhat counter-productive.
