‘I write novels of ideas, but the ideas have to be lived by characters’: Author Sanjena Sathian

When Sanjena Sathian’s 2021 début, Gold Diggers, blossomed in Atlanta bookshops, I was wary of its premise. South Asian American suburbia, the novel’s epicentre, is hardly terra incognita in literatures of the global anglophone. I had some reservations going in: encountering talismanic extractions of India in the American cultural landscape; the concept of two “homes” and the dilemma of being suspended in some double unbelonging; hackneyed ethnographies of Ivy League-obsessives and Californian techies; and vignettes of one-upmanship within an immigrant community. And then there was a magical “conceit” – for want of a better word – the blurb teased: a concoction derived from gold jewellery, turned into a “lemonade,” which made the narrator, Neil Narayan’s desire to assume some Supreme Indian-American version of himself a potable dream. I was wary of this magic reinforcing tropes that distil the South Asian experience to the dregs of the canon’s literary icons. But, by the end of the prologue of Sathian’s début, her pithy, cheeky, immersive prose swallowed me into a story that was subversive both in terms of its content and its form.

Gold Diggers is a stellar tragicomedy that mocks the standards set within the Indian American community by that very liquid enforcement that, ironically, seeks to meet those...

Read more