The highly pleasurable experience of reading Akhil Sharma’s Family Life resembles somewhat the experience of reading Colm Tóibín’s novels, Nora Webster or The Heather Blazing. At the heart of all three novels are acutely painful experiences, based on biographical realities in the lives of their authors. These are realities which have been readily discussed by both writers, though with necessary caution, given that works of fiction are under consideration, not memoir.
In the case of the Tóibín stories, it is the stroke - and subsequent passing of the father figure who suffers it - that is the central, or climactic event in the two novels in question. Conversely, in Family Life, it is the elder brother Birju's tragic accident which is the pivotal event, after which the family is changed utterly.
Birju is the promising young school-boy who has been accepted for the Bronx High School of Science, the eldest scion on whom the hopes of his immigrant parents rest. However, in his younger brother Ajay's narrative, he never makes it to that august academy, because of an accident at a swimming pool, during which he lies for a full three minutes at the bottom of a pool. Oxygen deprivation leads to serious brain injury, and Birju becomes entirely dependent, firstly on hospital care, then on the largely indifferent attentions of a sub-standard nursing home. Finally, his family decided to look after the boy, with the help of nursing aides, equipping their New Jersey home with the necessary equipment.
That is the bald summation of the action, but Sharma’s second novel is so much more in its 210 pages. As in the work of the Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri, Sharma opens a fascinating window into the lives of Indian people as they adapt to American ways (which adapting in Family Life includes the temporary aberration that hot dogs are made of dog meat.)
Akhil Sharma
In Sharma's absorbing tale, the family hold on unquestionably to their religious customs while the mother in particular has an intense religious faith, notwithstanding her welcome for a host of miracle workers and quacks. God is prayed to fervently, as Birju's condition fail to improve. In one of the novel’s many poignant set-pieces, Ajay asks God to get rid of the three minutes which Birju spent at the bottom of the pool - he wants the deity to somehow erase the cataclysmic event from past time.
Social interaction within the New Jersey neighbourhood, with Indians and the so-called `whites', the formalities and nuances of Hindi speech, the delicacies of caste and skin colour - all these elements are lightly and perceptively treated by Sharma in his masterful tale. There are the 'whites', but there is also Birju’s Korean girl-friend who has `creamy white’ skin; there is the schoolboy from Trinidad, who is not Indian, and is thus designated `out of caste.’ The author is a master of sly humour which many admirers of this beautiful story have picked up on, dry, laconic asides such as the following: I used to think father had been assigned to us by the government. This was because he appeared to serve no purpose.
Ultimately, Sharma’s tale, which won the Folio Prize in 2015, is ineffably sad, although the abiding humour acts as a curious binding or raising agent. Humour also acts as a distraction from the sense of familial dread and loss that haunts the story. We can only hope 44-year old Akhil Sharma - already a winner of a PEN/Hemingway award for his first novel, An Obedient Father - continues to thrive and produce stories as brilliant and powerful as this one.
Paddy Kehoe
