May 29, 2006
At once clever and superficial, Tyrewala's debut novel presents 50 collaborative narratives set in Mumbai. Most of the stories are brief first-person accounts of makeshift perseverance against India's postcolonial problems: Hindu hostility toward Muslim minorities, mass poverty, pollution, corruption and the uneasy accommodation of global capitalism. But while many people Tyrewala channels—including an abortionist's father, an impotent adolescent and an unwitting polygamist—are immediately interesting, few are effectively realized, as Tyrewala's hero is the city itself, and he constructs this pulsing protagonist with interconnected vignettes featuring its citizens. For instance, an episode from the perspective of a woman seeking police help leads into another from the perspective of the petitioned officer, which leads to another from the perspective of a jaded journalist. The underlying concept is reminiscent of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas
, but Tyrewala fumbles the delivery: he successfully pits the specter of old-money Mumbai against the new poor, but fails to vary his austere prose style from character to character ("I am an abortionist"; "Today is my sixteenth birthday"; "I want to become a lawyer"). The result is a laudable debut, but some readers will find that what each character thinks is less interesting than how they think.