The Maris Review, vol 118

The theme of this week is going out on your own and discovering some harsh truths

What I read this week

I first met Malavika through my friends Kristen and Kayla, who live in Orlando and know every writer who was ever in the nearby vicinity. When I met Malavika she was a journalist and essayist and author of YA novels and with her adult debut I can confirm that she's really good at fiction too. At the time we met I had just had a book about disillusionment come out. I was solidly middle aged. Malavika's novel about disillusionment comes out today and she is solidly still in her mid-twenties. She got a head start in being underwhelmed with how the world works by being a climate activist in her teens, and learning all of the ways in which the grownups ignore the pleas of young people.

I tell you about Malavika's personal info because it's relevant here. The very first class Rishi, her protagonist in Unprecedented Times and an aspiring novelist who was formerly a teen climate activist, signs up for in her first semester of undergrad at Stanford is Asian American Autofiction. Rishi is trying to figure out how to tell her life story with just the right fictional flourishes, and through the course of the book we watch her develop as a writer.

In Rishi, Malavika constructs my favorite kind of character to get to know in a coming of age work: a know-it-all who, upon reflection, actually knows next to nothing. Her observations are spot on, her comments are delightfully bitchy, she is smart, smart, smart, but so stupid about emotional intelligence or reading the room. You might say Rishi is a (much hornier) Gen Z version of Elif Batuman's Selin (see below for more know-it-all books).

It's also important to note that the first semester of college that Rishi describes to us in painstaking detail takes place at the end of 2019. So we get to watch revel in her new found freedom all the while knowing that a huge narrative disruption is imminent. Unprecedented Times quickly becomes a campus novel that takes place at a time when campus is closed for business. After finding a group of close friends and drinking and partying and hooking up a lot with boys and girls, Rishi must return to suburban Florida when the pandemic hits. Glued to her phone as the only link to the social world she had recently built, Rishi must navigate how to be queer and progressive and artistic in a household where her parents' marriage was arranged and her mother's moods dictate just about everything.

Malavika's sentences have bite: through Rishi she finds the dissonance and ridiculousness in everyday situations. In the biz we call this kind of writing "voicy," but I think that's a little dismissive. I have read one too many novels in which Internet culture and lingo is used as a shortcut to character development: here, Malavika takes a very online character and gives her the task of trying to find out who she is when she's not tweeting about it.

Other Coming of Age Novels About Delightful Know-It-Alls Who Know Nothing

I think this is perhaps my favorite sub-genre? Most of these heroines are book smart to the brim, but terrible at navigating the world as it is.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Chemistry by Weike Wang

Problems by Jade Sharma

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Juliet Langbein

The End of Romance by Lily Meyer

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu

Good Girl by Aria Aber

Sunrise by Téa Obreht

I'm a Téa Obreht completist and I'm just blown away by what she's able to do with narrative structure in her Sunrise. Her latest novel tells three different stories that take place in or near the town of Sunrise, and it is a joy to speculate as you read the book about how those stories are going to converge.

The book is suspenseful from the very first page, which finds Nina Terzić landing in a mountain lake in a desolate area of Wyoming after jumping out of her boyfriend's rapidly descending Cessna. We watch Nina struggle to survive even as we learn bits and pieces of her backstory, even if she's perhaps not telling us the whole truth just yet. She makes her way to an abandoned ghost town right out of that one episode of The Brady Bunch, where she finds no signs of anyone who can help but at least she has shelter as the days go by and her stockpile of protein bars dwindles.

And then Nina makes a discovery. In a crawl space she finds a corpse, a jar of pickled eggs (ew, will she eat them?), and a binder that contains information about the town, which she learns is called Sunrise, as well as a fictionalized account of one of its local legends. We leave Nina's survival story to delve into the myth of the cowboy, that most American of fantasies, and we learn how the true story of the dime store novel hero that the town venerates is, as most stories are, more complicated than we like to believe.

Every section sings.

Are you fucking kidding me?

You know how it is when the bad guys, who have always been very bad, turn out to be much worse than you could have even imagined? Well, here's a story about that.