Akhil Sharma’s deadpan autobiographical novel, “Family Life”, ends with a kind of beginning. The narrator has taken his beautiful new girlfriend to a resort hotel. As they lounge by the pool and she leans against him, he feels happier and happier.
“The happiness,” Sharma writes, “was almost heavy.” And then comes the last line: “That was when I knew I had a problem.” When I ask Sharma how he’s feeling, the morning after he has won the £40,000 (Dh219,244) Folio Prize, he responds with a brief smile, a shrug and a flat-toned explanation of his tendency to pan the world for disappointment.
“My mind is like a police scanner,” he says, “wondering what’s wrong.” The first thing he felt when he heard he’d won, he says, was shame. If that sounds melodramatic, or inappropriately comic, the book itself goes some way towards explaining the background.
Sharma’s novel (his second) tells the story of an Indian family who move to New Jersey to begin what they hope will be a better life. Just after the elder brother is granted a place at a distinguished high school in New York, he dives into a swimming pool, hits his head and remains underwater for long enough to provoke a coma and lifelong brain damage.
All of this happened to Sharma’s family, and the story is told from the point of view of the younger sibling — Sharma’s alter ego, Ajay — with all the naive hope and pointed perception of a child.
“I wondered if he was dead,” Ajay thinks when his aunt says she has to go to the hospital. “This last was thrilling. If he was dead, I would get to be the only son.” Ajay lives through the wreckage of his parents’ aspirations: his mother’s misery, his father’s alcoholism, the daily burden of caring for his brother. “Daddy, I am so sad,” he says at one point. “You’re sad?” comes the furious response. “I want to hang myself every day.”
The book is so funny you almost feel guilty for laughing — some sort of alchemical transfer, one presumes, of Sharma’s shame into fictional gold. When his mother asks for a hearing aid, Ajay’s father replies: “Why? If by mistake some good news does come for you, I’ll write it down.”
Ajay begins to model himself on Ernest Hemingway. First, he reads a biography of Hemingway, in case he finds he likes the actual books less. Then he tries to copy him. Having written some stories “about white people” for English classes, because he’s not sure how to write about Indians, Ajay takes his cue from Hemingway’s casual racism, in a passage that is a sly and virtuosic piece of criticism.
“Having read Hemingway,” he says, “I knew that I should just push all the exotic things to the side as if they didn’t matter.” Of course, “Family Life” does the opposite and doesn’t deal in “exoticism” at all but, on the other hand, it’s so tightly focused that it doesn’t seem to lay claim to the territory occupied by grander novels about immigration either. It’s just about these human beings in these particular circumstances.
When I ask Sharma if he feels he has any sort of lifelong project, he says: “I hope not. I think of Thomas Hardy with his landscape, or even Faulkner, and yet Updike, with his willingness to write about anything, seems to have had a more fun life.” Just now, he’s working on a short story about Abraham Lincoln. “You know he fought a duel with this alcoholic Irish politician?” he asks. I first met Sharma last year, when he came to the Hay Festival to promote “Family Life”.
He was so mild-mannered and sincere that it took me a moment or two to adapt to his shades of irony and amiably rendered gloom. Sharma used to be a banker, and is married to a lawyer. Though his first novel, “An Obedient Father”, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, though many of his short stories have been published in The New Yorker and though he now teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, he does not especially feel part of a literary crowd.
When he meets writers he admires as a result of writing his own book, he is full of a genuine wonder you wouldn’t expect from his piercing assessment of Hemingway. In the intervening months, he has been travelling a lot. Indeed, he has been travelling so much “that I’ve gotten sciatica. Which feels a little bit like gout for successful writers”.
And he has been writing short stories because after the 12 years it took him to complete “Family Life”, he’s relieved to be doing what he describes as the literary equivalent of dating.
“I don’t ever want to be caught, the way I was caught with this book,” he says. “I didn’t know how to get through it. There were all these things I felt I had to honour. I just don’t want to be in that position again. There was such a responsibility about trying to make everything match life.”
Though he wanted to write about his family, he didn’t want to do it in nonfiction. “I just didn’t think I could generate the emotions in nonfiction that I could with fiction,” he says. “There are so many things you can’t do. You can’t use dialogue, you can’t compress characters, you’re forced to take time as it actually existed.”
He had to find dramatic equivalents for episodes of his own story that would convey how he felt about them at the time. For instance, the father in the book is an alcoholic, but Sharma’s father isn’t.
“What he suffers from is depression, and I didn’t know how to convert that into fiction, because it was so shapeless. What do you do with a man who just lies in bed and cries? So you make the selfishness more apparent. Where the mother and son stay up all night chatting to the father so he won’t drink, my mother and I used to play cards with my father so he wouldn’t feel alone.”
Sharma’s previous book was a disarming, controlled and horribly impressive novel told from the point of view of a child molester in India. (“You know, you always want to move towards whoever’s generating action, and that was the child molester and not the victim.”) Though it took him nine years to write, he experienced nowhere near the same difficulty as he did with “Family Life”.
By the time this book was nearing completion, Sharma’s wife, who had supported him, “was very unhappy and very angry”; his brother, the book’s core subject, had died; and still it took him another year to finish. “I don’t want to ever directly mine my own life the way I did here,” Sharma says. “It was like staying in a bad relationship. I thought it would end eventually.”
As for the state of mind the book’s end insinuates, he fights against it all the time.
In a piece, he revealed that for years — from age 15 onwards — he had relationships only with married women. Having a real relationship, as he puts it now, would have meant not having to be a child: “I didn’t know how to have an ordinary life.” His reluctance to be happy was “a type of anorexia, because you’re choosing not to consume things. You’re choosing not to consume happiness. I’d rather remain in a state of perpetual famishment. Because I recognise it — it’s more comfortable.”
So, when he won the Folio Prize, he experienced something akin to survivor’s guilt. “I almost wanted to cry, like I’d done something bad. Because why do I have so much luck? Why do I get to walk down the street? Why do I get to look at the sky? It’s just what happens when you are stamped by these events as a child.”
Still, little by little, he sees himself changing. “I used to rush across streets at the cross lights, and now I wait,” he says, “It suddenly makes me realise I was just cultivating anxiety. If you’re hurrying, you’re creating proof that there’s something to worry about. Whereas really there’s plenty of time.”
And Hemingway? What happened to modelling himself on him? Well, they had to part ways; Hemingway turned out to be pathologically selfish and cruel. Which proves, if nothing else, that things could be worse. As he reflects: “To work in the same field as these guys and not be a mess is a great thing.”
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015
