The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is Kiran Desai’s first novel to be published since her 2006 Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss, and it is well worth the wait. Its sprawling nearly-700 pages are packed with the best that contemporary fiction has to offer.
There’s especially plenty for literary fiction readers to love: it centers on the two titular writers’ coming-of-age as their intergenerational, international family stories collide, and Desai takes her time with their struggles with art, love and identity, carefully tracing the delicate signs of their personal growth.
Ancestral Echoes in Allahabad
The novel opens with neither of its titular characters, but instead with Sonia’s grandparents. They live at the family home in Allahabad, from which they field with incredulity Sonia’s weepy weekly phone calls home from the American college where she is studying to be a writer: how could such a successful and privileged child cry so much?
They have their own preoccupations, especially with navigating their nuanced social world, which includes an unmarried (and unmarriageable) adult daughter in tow, as well as an unmarried (but very marriageable) young adult grandchild (Sonia) living far away.
An Education in Desire and Despair
Sonia, relegated to a work study job at the university library to carry her through a long, quiet winter term, meets an eccentric painter named Ilan. She is seduced into an affair with this much older man, partly out of the belief that such is the type of worldly experience a writer is supposed to have.
She ends up, though, in a debilitating, abusive relationship. Ilan leaves her for Europe only to find her again in New York, where she moves in with him and loses all other social connections — and her writing practice — as she is consumed by fear of his moods.
Meanwhile, Sunny, an ambitious journalist working for the Associated Press in New York City, receives a proposal for an arranged marriage to Sonia, brokered by family members who have complex and long-standing connections. While neither Sunny nor Sonia takes the proposal seriously, they do, nevertheless, meet when both are in India. They immediately share a connection that catches them both by surprise.
Alone in a Crowd, Together in Struggle
The novel explores immigrant identity with stunning nuance. Sunny, whose job allows him the chance for a green card, thinks constantly about his mother but dreads the prospect of living in the same place as her. His mother, likewise, has mixed feelings about her son’s success, especially with how she grapples with how “this striving to escape India felt patriotic: If you were a worthy Indian, you became an American.”
The question of loneliness — particularly for immigrants — thrums throughout each section of this novel, not just those describing Sonia and Sunny. Several characters’ inner monologues echo and refract the haunting refrain, “it may be better to be one Indian instead of two Indians or two Indians instead of twenty Indians.”
Readers who pick up The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny can expect a funny and moving exploration of the forces that conspire to keep these characters alone — and what it might take for them to find each other.
About Kiran Desai:
Kiran Desai is the bestselling author of the novels Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in India, she came to the United States when she was sixteen and now lives in New York City.
