What might he ask the author of this dreck? There were no revelations here, just manipulations and make-believe. The abyss was the guy's own creation, its battle-won wisdoms self-serving and contrived: it was no great trick to build up a hard man only for the tear-jerking purpose of making him fall. This wasn't a novel, Ash thought, blowing his nose softly into a napkin. It was a con.I don't think that I, as a rule, like novels about novelists. And when this main character is unlikeable – with him protesting it unfair for readers to analyse his work and hold him to the opinions he has expressed on the page; with him being snide about the literary efforts of others (both the amateur and the bestselling); with him assuming that his interpretation of the world, as an artist, is superior to that of everyone else's – there's a danger of deciding that the author himself is unlikeable; that he's really writing about himself here. And while on the one hand, I get that Pasha Malla is likely purposefully, ironically, provoking me to this conclusion with Fugue States, on the other, it can't help but colour my opinion of him and this book. I didn't much like the experience.
Fugue States is a highly planned and structured work: Playing off both common senses of the word “fugue” (the disassociative mental state and the jarringly contrapuntal musical form), the plot starts and stops and repeats and changes. Another reviewer said that it reads more like a collection of short stories – with some sections more enjoyable than others, as in any such anthology – and I agree with that to a point; because I can see what Malla is trying to achieve with this disjointed format; the planning he put into shaking up the novel form in order to capture what was in his mind. In an interview, Malla says that this book is about “accepted scripts that exist – socially, culturally – in terms of not just masculinity, but racial and cultural identity for writers and artists, for relationships between men and women, for family relationships, for caregiving relationships. The book is really set around this idea that these kinds of expectations and scripts that exist are based in false narratives, or at least very reductive narratives.” That's a complicated theme, hung onto an ambitious framework, and while it may be highly literary and intellectualised (“esoteric” is the word the narrator uses to describe the kind of author he admires), it just doesn't make for a good reading experience. Malla can use a novelist-as-protagonist to ironically scorn the author-reader relationship, but if it was all going over this reader's head, then I can't call Fugue States a success.
A brief summary: Ash Dhar (the son of a Kashmiri immigrant man and the white hippy who once loved him) is a novelist and book-themed radio host whose father has recently, suddenly, died. Among his father's papers, Ash discovers an unfinished novel about a “hero's” journey along the famous Amarnath pilgrimage, and when Ash's oldest friend Matt (a ridiculous pothead womaniser; a white moron that Ash doesn't actually seem to like) suggests that they make the mountain trek themselves in honour of old Brij, Ash declines: he's not going to be some brown cliche, seeking his father in the abandoned homeland. When Matt goes to India anyway and gets into trouble, Ash finally makes his own kind of pilgrimage.
There were nice bits – I enjoyed everything about Chip and his disabled son, the final reminiscence about Ash and Brij's last day together was remarkable, there was a nice balance to discussion about the Troubles in Kashmir – but there were parts that irked me, too. In a novel about cultural identity, where Ash and Malla himself are both half-white and born and raised in Canada, I was turned off by the conclusion of the scene where Ash and a little boy meet at a hotel pool and the boy wants Ash to sing O Canada with him:
And they sang, and they sang. Ash with one eye on the exit should the kid's parents appear – should anyone appear – and find him here, belting out this ridiculous, nonsensical song, with everything he had, with all the fake, patriotic love in his heart.How should I not be offended by that? It's like when Yann Martel declared Canada “the greatest hotel on Earth” as he accepted his Booker Prize; as though this rich and welcoming country is simply a vague idea to which it would be inappropriate to commit. (And how am I not surprised that the first approving link I found to that statement was from the Globe & Mail, where Malla used to work?) So, related: I had no idea how I was supposed to react to the deplorable Matt – he's constantly on drugs and alcohol, shaves his entire body, tries to “turn” a lesbian (but abandons her after a horrible scene), and his behaviour towards Ash becomes progressively more abusive and more incomprehensible (even as his vocabulary is spiked with “frigs” and “poops” and “goshdarns”; who is this guy?) – and then I found Malla's explanation in that same article above: I just imagined what would have happened in the situation if this absurd character, who believes himself to have agency in every situation, enacts this privilege that he is oblivious to. Ah, so that's the point: that's how to subvert accepted scripts and upend reductive narratives; nothing reductive about that.
Fugue States is obviously the result of a thoughtful design, imagination, and skill. Malla has plenty to say, but little of it reached me through the obfuscating layers of construction. It's no con, but I can't consider this an overall success.
