Book Review

One won’t find what Charles Baxter calls “the quality of ‘lushness’ in art” in his essay “Lush Life” while reading Farah Ali’s novel The River, the Town. The reason is that the novel mirrors substance in style, echoes its sense in its sound. According to Baxter, lush prose telescopes more than one time or tense in its ambit. Ali’s novel is set in a static, granular present. The past is not telescoped in that present as flashbacks, but as labored switchbacks to present tense in past times, in multiple characters’ voices. Time in The River, the Town is not a pool of varying depths, but a flatlined graph, what one narrator calls “our dry-mouthed, concave-stomached sense of time.” Characters do not look back over their shoulders within their stories. The novel opens with the section titled “Baadal, 1995” which the son, Baadal, narrates, but that section cannot accommodate his mother Raheela’s story, for which one must be beamed back to “Raheela, 1966.” The novel is divided into five such sections, each devoted to a single interiority pinned within its timeframe.

Baxter suggests that when prose doesn’t “compress two time frames together,” instead hewing to a “narrow gauge aesthetics,” it might be trying to be “cool.” However, Ali’s novel depicts a geopolitically endangered other via the “narrow gauge aesthetics” of sparse prose and flattened time not to be cool, but to metaphorize an extreme “hotness.” It’s a novel about drought, and climate change-driven immigration and immiseration. Therefore, its staccato language, its image of time as an undifferentiated arrested present, invoke the climate catastrophe clock stalled in resonating silence amidst political chicanery and indifference. Thus, Ali’s arid prose unflaggingly echoes the not-distant hooves of apocalypse that her novel half imagines, half reflects. Its minimalism is the workshop of the gifted writer.

Space, like time, is also flat in this novel. For instance, the topography is unvaryingly unbeautiful and sterile from drought and land environmental degradation: “In July everything in the Town settles into an uneasy stillness. Brown houses sit heavily upon the earth. People walk slower, conserving energy . . . . visitors depart in their bus, and the Town looks browner and closer to death.” Named for two geographies—the town, the river—the story is of a dying town on the banks of a river like a “gray intestine,” with residents either migrating to the nearby city for work or living moribund lives. The narrators of The River, the Town are Baadal, a boy who grows up in the town, his mother Raheela, and his wife Meena. Baadal’s name means raincloud; it mockingly showcases the drought defining his milieu and zeitgeist. Meena is older than Baadal, and until this second marriage she’d occupied the liminal position of all adult women without men in this society—shunned and abandoned. It is mostly women who survive here, though they must circle the worlds men create and uncreate like physical and psychic satellites. However they might emotionally and imaginatively attempt to flutter away to other dream galaxies, love and loyalty must be subordinated to bodily survival. The butterfly of love lives a short summer’s day, and unrelenting pointless labor is the color of daylight. This assault of poverty on human closeness is most painfully evident in Raheela’s tragically scorched relationship with her son Baadal. The death of hope and beauty have shriveled her body and soul, and she primarily looks to men, including her son, as breadwinners. But the men of the Town can’t break through ever-tightening circles of poverty and unemployment, or overwork and exhaustion. Raheela ends the story, psychologically too blunted in the end to register that her husband and son are both present only as absences. Apropos the novel’s telos, in her atrophied and broken psyche, time is always a petrified “now,” and duration doesn’t register.

Lush language—which can bracket memories and experiences of living simultaneously in more than one time through memory, imagination, and anticipation—doesn’t thrive in a space trapped in an apocalyptic and static present. Even the bodies of characters are described in terms of food or famine: ingestion versus emptiness, plenty versus starvation, satiety versus hunger. Relationships are based or built on who can feed whom what. Other bodily experiences of sexuality, sensuality, aesthetics, beauty, romance, tenderness, and love are quickly exhausted or extinguished. Women routinely mate with or at least pursue men who can give them food. Mothers lash out at children who cannot make a living, bring home food. The body is nothing but a hunger machine, a voracious mill or grindstone that regularly roars out a crazed emptiness.

At times, the stark, stripped, emaciated prose of Ali’s novel feels too pitiless, perhaps a too single-minded or forced conceit even for a story of the despair of the forgotten in an unequal society in a third world country (Pakistan). One might ask—is it always necessary, let alone desirable, that sound be an echo to the sense? Are there no opportunities in lush prose even to represent withered lives? Deprivation and destitution have been captured by other writers in relatively expansive prose that has not necessarily ill-served the subject. One thinks of Salman Rushdie, Tobin, Malouf, McCarthy, Ben Okri, and Maryse Condé. None of them, writing about misery and existential crisis, chose a prose register like a desiccated whisper, such as Ali’s.

However, every writer’s technique aspires to a particular goal. Ali’s choices do serve her purpose, which is to voice and paint starkness. That purpose might, ironically, be glimpsed in the rare outbreaks of lush color in a work whose backdrop otherwise is an unrelieved dusty brown. So, if it ever rains in this drought landscape, “Everything became dark with water—the roofs of houses, the leaves on the trees, the strips of soil on the sides of the street, the street itself.” Water blooms as a color against the choking dust as if rubbing in its preciousness and precariousness. When the Town’s children are corralled into an NGO charade of local revival, they paint the colors nature denies their community: “In the picture the trees were a bright green, the sky a wonderful blue, the grass laid out like a carpet. The park we go to contains the same three things—grass, trees, sky—but they are all shades of yellow.” Such brief bursts of color aside, but precisely because of them, The River, the Town is a stark, stunning tale of the hollowing out of community and the human spirit in a wasteland of climate change-induced drought, scarcity, and hunger.