Brick Lane by Monica Ali
(Scribner, 2003)
Eileen Y. Lee

“If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.”

Monica Ali’s most recently published novel, Untold Story, is the “what-if” tale of Princess Diana—what if the glamorous icon had not died in a Parisian car crash and instead had moved secretly to Midwest America with a new identity and taken up the simpler life?  The book was released in the UK during the run-up to this past year’s royal wedding media extravaganza.  Ali, however, started her writing career in different waters with the socially aware Brick Lane, the story of a married Bangladeshi woman living in London public housing.  This first novel thrust the Dhaka-born, Oxford-educated author into the literary stratosphere, earning her a nod as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, while Brick Lane was short-listed for the Man Booker prize.

The beating heart of Brick Lane is Nazneen, a village girl who is sent to London for an arranged marriage to a 40-year-old man.  Part immigrant story and part meditation on the fate of women from a particular religious and cultural background, the novel is ultimately focused on Nazneen’s transformation from passive Muslim housewife into an individual possessed of free will who says, “I will decide what to do.  I will say what happens to me. I will be the one.”  This transformation happens—but not before one begins to wonder whether her richly-detailed life will simply collect dust as the narrative moves from 1985 to the months following September 11^th.

During its quiet unfolding, Brick Lane flits between Nazneen’s childhood memories of her sorrowful mother and letters from Hasina, the sister she had to leave behind in Bangladesh.  The letters depict a life filled with hardship and small joys, all written in Hasina’s broken English and naïve voice.  Even shocking details about her own rape and then a story about a friend burned with acid as punishment is told in several letters rather matter-of-factly.

As a chronicle of Nazneen’s marriage, Brick Lane is delightfully comical and at other times, sadly painful.  Early on, Nazneen learns to put aside any “high notions” of herself when she overhears her husband, Chanu, on the telephone: “Perhaps when she gets older she’ll grow a beard on her chin, but now she is only eighteen.  And a blind uncle is better than no uncle.  I waited too long to get a wife.”  Pretentious Chanu is continually the source of a good chuckle whenever he rails against the “ignorant types” of British society or forces his wife to listen to his pedantic speeches on philosophy or his “first love,” English literature.  “Have you heard of Richard II?” he says, “It’s not easy to translate.  Give me one minute.  This is a wonderful passage.”

Chanu is as equally proud of his university degrees as he is of his numerous framed certificates from night classes and correspondence courses on such varied topics as cycling and IT communications.  Driven to improve himself, yet ineffectual in his career, Chanu speaks constantly of a promotion that the reader—and Nazneen, as she grows more insightful—knows he will never get.  While a gentle soul, he can sometimes be heartless towards Nazneen, such as when he condescendingly mocks her suggestion to go to Dhaka to locate Hasina, who leaves her love marriage and must fend for herself in Bangladesh’s capital city.  He says:

“Shall I pack a suitcase?  Perhaps you have prepared one.  I shall go to Dhaka and pluck her instantly from the streets and bring her back to live with us.  On the way, I could pick up the rest of your family and we could make a little Gouripur right here.  Is that what you have in mind?”

It is only because of Ali’s sensitive regard for her characters that Chanu does not become a caricature of a husband.  Chanu eventually garners his own sympathy as his full portrait is painted, showing that he is a decent husband, loving father to their two daughters, and a man of quashed ambitions in a society that lumps him together with every other dark-skinned immigrant.

At its most incisive, Brick Lane is a sustained study of both its major and minor characters.  Even when the novel’s plot languishes midway through, the supporting cast in Nazneen’s life continues to shine.   Her best friend, Razia, is feisty (“Do you know why I’m going to learn English?  So that when my children start telling dirty jokes behind my back, I’ll be able to whip their backsides.”), but chooses to turn a blind eye to her son’s worsening drug addiction until nearly all the furniture in their home is sold.  She lives a life that matches her independent spirit only after her controlling husband is killed in a factory accident by the crush of “seventeen frozen cows.”  If there is a villain in Brick Lane it is Mrs. Islam, the elderly, sweet-tongued usurer lady, who will bring along her thug sons to enforce payments in the neighborhood.  Her changing relationship with Nazneen is woven throughout the story.

The most pivotal character is the decisive community organizer, Karim, who also delivers clothes for Nazneen’s sewing jobs and is therefore able to cross the threshold into her domestic world.  His appearance as her younger lover comes as a surprise, as is Nazneen’s decision to start attending radical Bengal Tigers meetings at his encouragement.  This is the first time the outside world penetrates her narrow life—as talk of the World Trade Center attacks comes to dominate the local meetings and her family’s mailbox becomes the target of a “leaflet war” that seeks to draw or erase the battle lines between “native” and “Islamic” elements.

Nazneen finds herself in turmoil over her relationship with Karim.  At these times, Ali’s graceful writing can unfortunately veer towards romance novel territory with such sentences as this: “Unbidden, a memory of Karim came, entering her as he entered her, tearing apart her passive soul.”

Karim sees Nazneen as a concept of maternity and security (“A Bengali wife.  A Bengali mother.  An idea of home”) and hopes they may marry, but time is running out as Chanu aspires to take his wife and daughters back to Bangladesh.  In the end, Nazneen’s choice is not between her husband and Karim, or London and Bangladesh, instead she must decide to be the director of her own destiny.  For those who have waited patiently for the dust on the pages to be swept away, the last chapters provide a frenetic energy and offer an ending filled with hope and new beginnings.

Eileen Y. Lee has a B.A. from Vassar College and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.  She studied abroad in London for one year and counts it as one of her favorite cities in the world.

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Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
(Little, Brown and Company/August 2008)
Alexandra Rae Valint

Vampires are cool again. Of course, to we steadfast lovers of the bloodsucking mythical creatures, vampires have always been cool: stealthy, seductive, and inexhaustible metaphors for sex, empire, death, and desire. However, vampires have not always been as sexy as they are now, and as they undeniably are in Stephenie Meyer’s cultishly popular Twilight Saga, the finale of which came out on August 2.

Edward Cullen, our vampire hero and star-crossed love of our human heroine, Bella Swan, is perfection: a chiseled, cold, god-like body paired with an enviable IQ. He’s a guy’s guy who plays baseball and loves fast cars, but he’s also the type of guy you bring home to your parents, who opens doors for you and lovingly records you a CD of songs he’s composed for you on his piano (which, by the way, he’s kind of a prodigy at). Oh, and he’s totally okay with just kissing. He’s inspired a legion of loyal fans who endlessly extoll his flawlessness. He’s nothing like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who for all his manipulative magnetism always aroused equal amounts desire and repulsion. Neither was Dracula quite the same brooding, tortured type that the vampire has become in today’s fang-friendly pop culture. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s resident vampire-with-a-soul, Angel, brooded with a stern, apprehensive face and morose eyes for three seasons before broodingly departing (at night, in shadow, without a word) to spin-off show Angel, where he brooded successfully for many more seasons. The recently aired (and cancelled) CBS series Moonlight starred another brooding vampire with a conscience who was, again, in love with a feisty blonde mortal. Such TV series have continued the trend towards the humanization and sexification of the vampire, along with the concomitant lessening of the danger and violence associated with the vampire’s demonic desires. Those sickly anemic looks, pointy fangs, and unwilling neck-scarred human victims have become stunning paleness, a set of perfect teeth, and a jug of extra blood from the hospital or leftover from the butcher’s shop. The vampire has increasingly become the repository for our hopes and anxieties about the human status as hero/victim: trapped within an everlasting yet bloodless and therefore blood-lusting body, the vampire struggles above his demon—his own self—to be “good,” “selfless,” and as “normal” as possible. The vampire has come to represent the human situation. Edward Cullen embodies this paradigm to the hilt, desperately trying to be good and moral in every way still open to him.

Clearly, there is nothing new about vampire lit. After Stoker and Polidori, Anne Rice, L.A. Banks, and Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (the basis for HBO’s fall series True Blood) followed. But no other vampire lit, to my knowledge, has caused this kind of frenzied, impassioned ferment. Witness: bookstores sponsor nationwide midnight release parties a la Harry Potter; a high school girl band, The Bella Cullen Project, gets their Twilight-inspired compositions distributed on iTunes (I recommend “Switzerland”); I’m up reading wide-eyed until 4 a.m., only to finally go to sleep and dream about the characters, only to wake up and write an acoustic-folk song with my sister (also a fan), only to then brag about said song to all my friends, who one-by-one I have converted to the series (my book conversion rate has never been higher).

To the still un-converted, the premise of the series is fairly simple: Bella Swan, our narrator, moves to Forks, a sleepy, rainy city in Washington State. Her first day at school, as she gazes across the abyss of the cafeteria, she locks eyes with a handsome pale boy sitting with other beautiful pale people (his adopted vampire family). Indescribable attraction and inevitable love ensue, even when she discovers he’s a vampire and even after he confesses that he must restrain himself from biting her because her blood is pretty much the best smelling liquid in the beverage store. Various threats to their love/life occur in the first three books, and through it all Bella desperately yearns to be turned into a vampire so she can live with Edward for ever and ever. The arrival of the fourth and final book in the series, Breaking Dawn, had the Twilight universe atwitter. Would Bella go through with the wedding? Would she become a vampire? Would Jacob (Bella’s best friend and a werewolf) imprint? Would Bella and Edward have sex? When August 2 arrived, and I cracked open the hefty hardback, I nearly read the 754 pages in one sitting.

Twists and surprises and answers to the aforementioned pressing questions make it almost impossible to talk about the book beyond page 25. However, from my investigation into the massive online response, Breaking Dawn has been met with more resistance and less unconditional glee than the previous three books received. Of course, a beloved series’ final book will never be met with hugs and kisses from everyone, and the book does take a distinct turn in subject matter, narrative structure, tone, and mood. The book feels more adult and less young adult, and perhaps that’s why some of the young fan base feels a bit alienated and betrayed. The book is no longer concerned with proving Edward and Bella’s love, but rather with handling the crises that come after love is assured. Such a maturation was to be expected; Bella leaves high school and parents behind, and she ventures into the unknown terrains of marriage and vampire existence (comically, the first causes her much more dread than the second). Even Meyer’s oftentimes inflated, indulgent prose feels more controlled, descriptively tighter here; she spends less time, though still a lot of time, expressing mushy love and describing steamy kisses and instead takes both the mushiness and steaminess of Edward and Bella’s relationship for granted (although the cold planes of Edward’s chest still receive an undue amount of attention).

Meyer is writing a different kind of book in Breaking Dawn: not girl gets boy, or girl gets boy back, or girl gets stuck in a classic love triangle. Breaking Dawn’s winding plot is harder to stereotype as frothy teen fantasy romance when it’s mostly preoccupied with the reasons we form the families we do and the ways we keep them from disintegrating. Thematically, the books have always emphasized choice and sacrifice (ironically within a framework of destiny), but yet again, such topics have matured and broadened in this final book. Breaking Dawn’s climactic showdown, a more psychological and nuanced battle than the one in Eclipse, features relevant questions about power, war, corruption, and the necessity of resisting the politics of fear.

I have spent a lot of time wondering why these books are so gosh-darn popular. Certainly, there is the refreshing, yet endearingly sexy, abstinence of Bella and Edward and the drug and alcohol free high school scene, both which makes the world of Gossip Girl a drunken and stoned red-light district by comparison. Of course, there is the grand, love-at-first-sight, fated passion between Bella and Edward, a soul mate scenario which invokes Juliet and Romeo and Cathy and Heathcliff (Bella and Edward actually quote from Wuthering Heights to express their mutual infatuation). But, I think, at the heart of readers’ intense investment in the series is that Bella, a seemingly ordinary girl who doesn’t fit in in “this world,” whose life in “this world” is defined by mind-numbing mediocrity, has another viable option; she has an escape.

And here is the core fantasy behind the series: not that an average looking girl instantaneously mesmerizes a beautiful and brilliant supernatural being (although that is another fantasy), but that she possesses something special and inherent that makes her belong more to that other world, the glamorous supernatural realm, than to this mundane world of cafeteria lunches and graduation thank you cards. Of course, when Bella bemoans her life of mediocrity she also reveals her own, distinctly not-average strengths: her incredible bravery, loyalty, and ability to notice that an important letter is written, crucially, on a page torn from her copy of The Merchant of Venice. Despite her clumsiness and her human need for food and sleep, she’s always possessed a “superpower.” Although Edward’s superpower is the ability to read everyone’s mind, Bella’s mind has consistently been a closed book to him (it aggravates him; delights her). Bella’s mind is a fortress of sorts, defended by steely resolve and a wry individualism. Breaking Dawn satisfyingly follows this potential in ways that, again, I can do no more than hint at. Bella’s mind becomes her ultimate strength and her ultimate gift—a capitulation proving that an intelligent girl is always already a superhero.