Book Review

Atlas of Unknowns
by Tania James
Alfred A. Knopf, 2009
www.aaknopf.com
ISBN: 978-0-307-26890-7

Atlas of Unknowns, the first novel by Tania James, is a story about storytelling: the stories we tell ourselves to make life more palatable; the stories we let others tell us about themselves—and about ourselves. These stories can preserve memories or subvert them.

In this book, the principle storytellers are the Vallara sisters, Linno and Anju, and their father, Melvin. They live in a village in Kerala, India, with Ammachi, Melvin’s mother. The sisters' mother, Gracie, drowned when they were young, before the story begins, but her presence is felt throughout the novel all the more for her absence. We never know Gracie's true perspective—we only know her through a few letters she wrote and through the memories of those she left behind: her family, and her friend, Bird, whom Anju later meets when she moves to New York after winning a scholarship to attend a private high school there.

Anju's desperation to win that scholarship leads her to commit an act of betrayal that is the catalyst for the major arcs of the novel. This betrayal occurs in the first of the novel's four sections, which is appropriately titled Origin. In the second, Orientation, Anju first arrives in New York and makes plans for a new life: to turn her student visa into a green card; to find the means to provide money and happiness—retribution—to her family.

For years, Anju has made a habit of mentally penning lines to her autobiography. It is almost always the same line, a variation on the epiphanic flashes found in biographies she has read, most recently those of Franklin Roosevelt, Indira Gandhi, and an unauthorized tome of Oprah Winfrey. The line always ends with....he found himself at a crossroads.

And now sitting in window seat 29A, selected for its proximity to one of four emergency exits, she thinks: In the airplane, I found myself at a crossroads. At the moment, there is no crossroads, only a gray runway leading in a singular direction that her tiny window will not allow her to see. But uttering the line gives Anju a Modicum of control, a sense of promise. A crossroads does not end in a crash.

Linno, back in India, has her own tiny window that obscures her vision. While most women her age, 21, are getting married, Linno instead is fending off the marriage proposals of her one ardent suitor, attempting to find her way as an artist, and watching over Melvin, who worries about Anju. She also is coping with her complex feelings for her sister: "Love and hate, hope and fear, all of these mingle in the same quarters of her heart."

The perspective shifts back and forth between Linno and Melvin in India and Anju and Bird in New York. James deftly moves between the two cultures and countries, describing each setting with astute detail and creating realistic, flawed yet endearing characters with unique voices.

Anju, a gifted student, discovers that life in New York is not even remotely what she had hoped it to be—her well-to-do Indian American host family eats beef and wears shoes inside. The son, Rohit, on leave from Princeton, is constantly filming his parents and later Anju, when she gets in some trouble and risks losing her visa, for the documentary he hopes to make. In what must be a wink from James to the reader, the son says to Anju that his film will be

About immigration, both legal and illegal. About sisters, about family pressure, about the cross-cultural divide between Indians at home and Indians abroad. All through the lens of your life.

In many ways, this is a coming-of-age novel. Both sisters, and also Melvin in some ways, are transformed throughout the novel (butterflies are a recurring symbol) in their quests to discover what it really means to be a family, what it feels like to know you're home, and what it takes to be able to truly say, as Gracie did, "I choose this life."

They must also face and accept the truths and mistakes from their pasts that they have invented stories to ignore. For the novel is also about loss and theft, or at least its attempt—prized possessions are stolen; dreams and ambitions are stolen; attention is stolen. Even stories are stolen, at least for a time. As Anju realizes, "This is all a kind of thievery, the business of steering someone's life." And those thefts come at a great price for all the primary characters, and even some of the secondary. But for a few, through this cost comes growth and the ability to "steer" their own lives, the endings to their own stories. As Gracie wrote to Bird, "The betel nut tree is thin, but you can't break it, it's so strong. You know my meaning? It will not break because it bends. The same for me." And the same is true for Gracie's daughters.

Atlas of Unknowns is a good, good novel. It is funny and wise and heartfelt. Tania James has a deep understanding of people and family, and of craft; she knows how to tell a story, and she has a masterful hold on the reigns..—Catherine Harrison