I read Priya Sarukkai Chabria's Generation 14 while on a fellowship in Canada, with plenty of time for intellectual and artistic pursuits, usually unavailable to me in India. While reading the novel I happened to come across an essay by the Czech writer, Milan Kundera in a back issue of The New Yorker, entitled "What is a Novelist?” Here, Kundera compares the novelist to the lyric poet (which Priya is). He quotes Hegel: "The great lyric poet will very quickly...end up drawing the portrait of himself." Thus, the content of lyric poetry is the poet himself, which is how it is in the case of Priya the poet. Well-known writers and critics have been quoted on the first page of Generation 14, praising Priya's poems, and it is no accident that I am one of them.
But coming back to the novel and to Milan Kundera, Kundera calls the novel a conversion story—myth substituting lyricism, which he refers to as "anti-lyric conversion". What he means by this is that the novelist, unlike the lyric poet, is separated from himself, and suddenly sees himself from a distance, astonished to find that he is not the person he thought he was.
Now, this is exactly what happens to Chabria in Generation 14. Myth substitutes lyricism, the myth in question in this case being the myth of the clone, a significantly trendy myth today. There are three generations at work in Priya's novel—the 24th, 21st and the 22nd. The 22nd century is the past to the narrator, but it is the future to us. This, as I see it, is where the complications begin. For, the characters who inhabit these three time zones don't have names. Instead, they have numbers: Clone 14/53/G, 14/54/G, 13/15/G, all introduced to us on the first page of the novel itself. We have to keep turning the pages back and forth in order not to lose track of what is going on. To cap it all, there are the italicized journal entries, which seem distinct from the rest of the novel. The chapters, and the sections contained within them, use both the Roman I, II, III, but also the regular 1, 2, 3 within each chapter, and this takes away somewhat from the logicality of the structure.
Priya Sarukkai Chabria's advocates, and my friend the poet Dibyajyoti Sarma who loved the novel is surely one of them, may point out in her defense that what she has done conforms to what the learned Mikhail Bakhtin has to say about the polyphonic novel and dialogism. But I'm not so sure.
Every novel is an extended narrative that makes demands on the reader's time and attention. (Priya's novel is nearly 300 pages in length). If it fails to absorb the reader because of its obtrusive style, as a result of which the reader is unable to suspend his disbelief and keep on with the flow of the narrative, seeing it to the end, it is flawed. Most readers of Generation 14, I suspect, are likely to throw up their hands in despair and give up reading it at some point, though precisely at what point I can't say, for it would depend on their endurance level, which of course differs from reader to reader. Even Dibyajyoti Sarma did not read everything. When I called him from the States to discuss the novel, he told me he had skipped the italicized portions, the secret journal containing the narrator's recollections, which to me, quite by contrast, was the interesting part, the part that contains the lyricism of which Milan Kundera speaks.
Let's not forget that there is a Page 15 Club even for as phenomenal a novel as Midnight's Children: its members are those who have not been able to get past page 15 of the novel.
Alongside Generation 14, I read a short story entitled "Year's End", by Jhumpa Lahiri in The New Yorker (it can be found in her recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth, now in the bookstores). I couldn't help comparing and contrasting the two fictions. While the Jhumpa Lahiri story moved me to tears, Priya's novel left me cold on account of its pretentiousness. And the reason why the Jhumpa Lahiri story worked—I photocopied it for my Writing Fiction class—is precisely because, in the manner of the great lyric poet, she ended up drawing the portrait of herself.
What I want to ask Chabria is this: if she wanted to write a political satire and comment on the high points of India's history (blurb), why did she choose sci-fi? Why did she choose a form (and format) that draws so much attention to itself, that the average reader misses the point completely? Is she afraid to confront reality head-on? Or is her novel intended merely for an exclusive and esoteric club of hi-fi readers? Is it sci-fi for the hi-fi? We need more writers to give us their take on the 21st century, without worrying unduly about the 22nd and the 24th. And what about the 23rd century in between?
As a friend and well-wisher, my advice to Priya is to write more poems of the kind we saw in her first collection of poems, Dialogue and Other Poems. It is as a poet that Priya Sarukkai Chabria will be remembered by posterity, and by us while we are alive.
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