nebraskaBy Monica Dutta
Forget the humble. Let the interpreters – the answerers of history, the trolls of the margins, the keepers of the last word – inherit the earth.
At the very least, it might be worth listening to them. Such is the case with Monica Dutta’s thrilling new novel “Nebraska,” which deals with the tragedy of the Chatterjee family through a Bengali psychoanalyst named BX Roy, who has a fondness for eccentric footnotes and compares himself to a “deeply perceptive magpie.”
Another type of narrator (a vulture?) might present Anna Chatterjee as a monster. The facts are truly horrific: She killed her youngest child by pushing his wheelchair in front of a train approaching Grand Central Station. But Roy presents the story in stunning detail, relying on stolen diaries and his own research to unearth every inner and global force that could have driven Anna to the stage. The result is a dizzying, sometimes nausea-inducing masterwork that defies classification or discriminating interest.
Prabir, Anna’s husband, after a year-long imprisonment, meets his adult children, Nina and Neil, on what he believes is his parole date. But when they reach the prison, Anna is long gone, and her jailers will not reveal anything about the circumstances of her departure.
Apart from Roy and Chatterjee, the novel’s other important character is Jean-Louis Katz (another psychoanalyst!), who treated Neil in Paris, befriended Nina in Canada and, importantly, was aboard the train in which his brother died, an event that became the icon of his career. These relationships and his professional training allowed him to understand family dynamics with diorama-like accuracy. Roy already knew Katz, and discovered his personal effects at an auction of unclaimed packages, which contained a storehouse of Chatterjee’s notes. None of these are spoilers. The revelations in this story come from the deepest recesses of the id.
Any reader attracted to “Nebraska” by now must ask: Am I ready for a narrative that abandons all traditional trail markers?
Roy ignores chronology, delays catharsis, bounding in directions that most editors might gently call “weeds.” Just as a therapy session rarely progresses organically, the information in “Nebraska” arrives when it is irreverent, with chapters jumping between decades, continents and viewpoints.
After the opening scene, it’s challenging to keep track of where the various characters are at a certain point in history. But the story of Rabi Chatterjee, a sweet boy with cerebral palsy and an IQ of 25, and his death at the age of 8, begins with his mother in Kolkata.
Anna grew up politely with parents who tolerated her, and encountered Prabir through a private advertisement placed by his family, which promised “no barriers to caste”. Prabir was living in England at the time and working as an Oxford-educated chemistry lecturer with a Scottish brogue. Once his visa is secured, and his new family has ground him into a wife paste, Anna will join him there.
This disparity and emotional detachment defined their entire marriage. Every decision taken by Chatterjee, every criticism he made, including after he moved to the United States, was driven by a certain irony. Describing Anna and Prabir’s engagement, Roy mentions “the most auspicious wedding dates of the month,” Shubh Vivah Muharat. “If you don’t understand why Prabir’s wedding couldn’t take place next month, you won’t.”
Readers are fortunate to have Roy, himself a product of the subcontinent, interpreting this pile of history. “Sometimes at conferences the modern person, almost always American, will say they want something like Representation In his books. I didn’t do it because Indians were ridiculous in books written by Westerners,” he said in a stellar tone. “That’s why we all love Wodehouse, who hardly mentioned us.”
If you don’t understand why that comment is so hurtful, then you just don’t understand.
It is narratively useful for Roy to be so candid about his low estimation of the imperial project. The turmoil of partition, the long tail of racial stereotypes in Britain, the fundamental incompatibility that many immigrant families find in new homes – these forces, Roy believes, are as much to blame for Rabi’s death as Anna’s maternal despair.
As easily as Anna was portrayed as a heartless Medea – in the words of a New York prosecutor, “We welcomed her into our country, and she avenged us on the tracks with her son” – her actions more clearly resemble an expression of distorted love than pure evil.
The structure of the novel, a child’s death doubly filtered through the sieve of two psychoanalysts, allows a compassionate and respectful window into Anna, even in her most unhinged moments. Not every reader will be sympathetic to this stance, but I found it inspiring, partly because of Dutta’s tremendous control over the emotional sphere. (In light of the novel’s ingenious engineering it is worth noting that Dutta, whose previous novel was the equally interesting “Thieving Sun”, also works as an architectural designer.)
The glimpses of insight into his characters are brilliant and horrifying. Neal’s very specific phobia, hinted at at the beginning of the book, emerges in a pitch-perfect, absurd chapter that could stand as an artist’s coming-of-age story about what to do when your best friends are being disturbed by your antics. Nina’s career as an architect may be the essence of countless therapeutic sessions as to why she dedicated herself to designing pleasant environments for a life she would never live. Rabi was a teenager when he was murdered, and never fully thought about his death.
Still, the portrayal of grief in “Nebraska” borders on the sublime.
Prabir, mourning his cremated child, says: “His son was now distilled into water and air. Everything that lived had some part of him in it.”
On the day she murdered Rabi, Anna was thinking about her family: “The lie of omission – of abandoning herself – would be her only gift to them.”
However, Roy has the ultimate authority over the Chatterjee family, bypassing the perceptions of Katz, the lawyers, the witnesses, the neighbours. By turns gentle, informative and entertaining, his commentary takes the story from drippy family dramas and police blotters to the sublime.
True, Roy has his prejudices. Rabi is in his mind another example of colonial plunder, as challenged as the Elgin Marbles, and he considers Katz a well-intentioned buffoon. But this magpie orientation – detailed enough to find connections between the multi-hyphenate writer Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali vegetarians and neoliberalism, the Swedish butter scandal and countless other fissures – makes it clear that the story is immutable. “Nebraska” is not just a novel of murder, disfigured immigrants, the limitations of the American justice system or the loneliness of marriage. It’s all this, and more.
What does the title of the book mean? Anna’s whereabouts may be a secret to her family, but readers learn from the first pages that she has been taken in by a reverend and his wife, who sponsored her release and brought her to live with them outside Omaha. He is essentially contracted there, and could not be located after adopting his last name. This is his latest home confinement in his lifetime. Yet she is also retelling a classic American story: Reach out, atone, rebuild. If she can achieve some degree of independence, she can eventually become the author of her own life.
nebraska | By Monica Dutta | Astra House | 465 pp. | $29.
