grieving

Western Lane – Chetna Maroo (2023) 161 pages

I am not interested in sport of any kind. I’m not anti-sport either, it just completely passes me by. So a novel about squash is not one I’d leap on. But of course Western Lane isn’t about squash; I don’t really know any more about the game than I did before reading the novella. What it explores, against the background of 11 year-old Gopi’s squash playing, is grief, family relationships, and tentative healing.

“It was with a feeling of having been rescued that I raised my racket and served.”

Gopi lives with her widowed father and her two older sisters, beautiful Kush and angry Mona, whose rage is palpable as she tries to keep the home running after the death of their mother.

Their father takes them to the titular sports centre, seemingly at a loss as to how to provide support for his daughters when he is in so much pain himself. Of the three, it is Gopi who throws herself into the game.

“I began dreaming of Western Lane. I saw the white walls and the blossom outside. At night I got out of bed and went over to the windows where there was a bit of light coming through the curtains. I sat on the floor with my racket, my back against the radiator. It was silent now because it was no longer on. I fixed a new grip onto my racket inexpertly, then peeled the tape off and fixed it again.”

The characterisation is so well realised. Her father is distant and quiet, and yet still such a presence on the page. The adult reader understands more of his grieving that Gopi does, and his floundering underscored by deep love and kindness is so moving.

There is a restrained supernatural element which runs through the story. All the family at some times feel a sense of the person who is gone. This is never explained away, nor does it grow into a metaphysical/magic realist type story. Instead it serves to demonstrate how the absence of their mother/wife is a constant presence for them all:

“Maybe, I thought, she would arrive eagerly only to find that things were too solid, and that we – our bodies – were too hard for her. I wondered would our touch bruise her. Would our talk hurt her ears. When we moved would we seem to fly past her, causing her to fall back.”

They all struggle with well-meaning friends and relatives interfering at various points and the pain of this becomes deeper as it threatens Gopi’s friendship with Ged, a white boy, and her father’s friendship with Ged’s mother.

“While Ma was alive, whenever we did something we weren’t supposed to, our relatives would bring Ma’s feelings into it, as if she was easy to hurt. But she wasn’t. It didn’t matter now. Now she was gone, our capacity to hurt her seemed infinite.”

The novella builds towards a climax of a squash tournament, as Gopi tests herself for the first time against unknown players in an unfamiliar setting. But really I didn’t feel it needed this construct. The family relationships, the tensions and strains, and Gopi trying to manage huge feelings provided enough drive to the plot.

Maroo’s writing is beautifully restrained throughout the whole novella and so thankfully, Western Lane doesn’t end on a lifted-onto-shoulders-waving-the-cup moment, but something much more ambiguous and real. This wasn’t unsatisfying and the story felt whole. I was left hoping that things worked out for them all.

“The world seemed big and luminous with some secret that would soon be known to me.”

Where Reasons End – Yiyun Li (2019) 170 pages

Trigger warning: mentions suicide

Where Reasons End is a novella without a driving plot. It is written from the point of view of a grieving mother in dialogue with her dead son.

“I was a generic parent grieving a generic child lost to an inexplicable tragedy.”

The mother is a writer and is trying to make sense of what has happened in the only way she knows how.

“It was not a world of gods or spirits. And it was not a world dreamed up by me; even my dreams were mundane and landlocked in reality. It was a world made up by words, and words only. No images, no sounds.”

She does this with the full knowledge that she will never make sense of such an immense tragedy. Her son Nikolai died by suicide aged 16. In the space they occupy together on the page he is just as argumentative and contrary as any other teenager. It’s hard to know if Nikolai’s attitude is the mother/writer trying to convey how her son was in life, or if his harsh judgements are in fact the judgments and anger she feels towards herself.

“Since when have you become an avid consumer of inane analogies and inept metaphors? Nikolai said.”

As the title suggests, Where Reasons End does not aim for facile conclusions. There’s no way to reason out something so horrific that it is beyond all reason. This means that Nikolai is not a fully rounded character. We know certain facts of his life and we get a sense of who he may have been, but Li does not allow us the easy escape of trying to piece together why he would do such a thing. He remains out of reach to the reader in a reflection of how he was and is out of reach to those who love him.

“You cannot demand that everyone be perfect.

I can forgive everyone, he said, for being imperfect.

But not yourself.

I tried, Mommy, I did try.”

if I’ve made Where Reasons End sound a very heavy read I’ve done it an injustice. It concerns an immensely painful subject but there is humour in it too, such as the mother/child arguments between an exhausted parent and a petulant teenager. Nikolai’s unhappy that his mother has bought a real Christmas tree the first festive season after he died:

“Whatever, he said.

Oh, judgemental as ever, I protested in my thought. And unforgiving. And unyielding.

Yieldingly and forgivingly I inquire, he said, Did you decorate it?”

This is not the novella to read when you want a plot-driven story. But it is a sensitive and painfully real exploration of grief. Very sadly, from the in memoriam dedication at the start of the book, I believe that it is also drawn from real life experience.

“There is no good language when it comes to the unspeakable, I thought. There is no precision, no originality, no perfection.”