http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Nicholson-t.html?scp=2&sq=Geoff+Nicholson&st=nyt
THE KONKANS By Tony D'Souza. 308 pp. Harcourt. $25. March 2, 2008 American Hybrid By GEOFF NICHOLSON When the Portuguese conquered parts of the western coast of India in the 16th century, Jesuits leading gangs of African slaves captured the local Hindus and rubbed their mouths with raw pork, instantly transforming them into untouchables. The Roman Catholic Church then embraced these outcasts via mass baptisms, creating a large population of converts. This, Tony D'Souza shows us in his second novel, 'The Konkans,' was just one of the methods used by the 252-year Goa Inquisition, and partly explains the continuing existence of a significant Catholic, pork-eating minority in and around Goa. These are the Konkans. D'Souza's novel tells the story of an extended Konkan family in Chicago in the 1970s, with flashbacks into their personal and cultural history. It's narrated by Francisco D'si, the son of Lawrence, also known as Babu, and Denise, an American who met Babu in his native India, where she worked in the Peace Corps, teaching native women to build smokeless ovens. The marriage is a love match only in a limited sense. Denise marries Babu because of her love for India, and he marries Denise because he wants to migrate to America. Babu gets his way, though this makes neither of them happy. She's disappointed by her husband's determination to become a fully integrated American. He's frustrated because integration requires more than determination. He discovers golf, whiskey and rage. Babu is followed to America by other members of his family, including two brothers, Les and Sam. Their efforts to make their way in America are sometimes comical, as when the two brothers decide to slaughter a pig to make a traditional curry, although they've never slaughtered a pig before and scarcely know how to cook. Later, a cousin, Winston, sneaks across the Canadian border into America and worries there might be tigers lurking in the forest. He's told not to worry: the Americans have killed all their wild animals. The family encounters racism real enough, though not especially savage. When they move into an upscale white neighborhood, their house is bombarded nightly with tomatoes. They complain to the police, who put a squad car outside the house. When one of the culprits turns out to be a neighbor's teenage son, his father is apologetic and promises to punish him. We hear no more of it. More painful is that Babu, after years of being overlooked in his job as an insurance manager at a multinational corporation, is finally promoted -- but only when the company needs a dark-skinned guy to fire other dark-skinned people. Babu has qualms about taking on the role, but he accepts it as part of the process of going native. 'The Konkans' is a humane book, sometimes easier on its characters than they perhaps deserve. A long affair between Denise and her brother-in-law Sam, which results in a child, is presented as far less problematic than it would be in reality. "I don't want to portray my father as a cuckolded fool," Francisco says, "because, of the three of them, he was having the happier time." That sentence -- happier, not happiest? -- is typical of D'Souza's sometimes wayward language. We read, for instance, "My mother imagined the wet town in her mind, the thronging people." Or, "The next Saturday that my uncle darkened my mother's doorway, my mother ran to open it onto him." I wish I could be more certain that this imperfect prose is the narrator's rather than the author's. Indeed, I found the narrator's omniscience a problem throughout. Although the book is written in the narrow first person, D'Sai seems to be a party to conversations that happened long before he was born and has a detailed knowledge of distant events and people;s thoughts and feelings. When we learn that a cook employed by the Peace Corps in India, who's alone and dying of alcohol poisoning, reminds himself "how nice it was that he could see the stars in their thousands at this monsoon time of year." it seems the author has exceeded the limits of his poetic license -- or has made a basic creative-writing-class mistake about point of view. 'The Konkans' has a shaggy, improvised feel. Characters disappear, conflicts fizzle out rather than come to dramatic conclusions, tales from the old country are told and told again, bits of history are tossed in haphazardly, and a funeral scene in the last chapter feels decidedly tacked on. D'Souza's father's family is from Goa, like D'Sai's, and his mother was in the Peace Corps in India. The author's first novel, "Whiteman" also had autobiographical elements. It's about an aid worker in West Africa, where D'Souza was in the Peace Corps. In 'The Konkans' D'Souza and his narrator are on the side of love, tolerance and familial respect, and against cruelty, racism and imperialism. We wouldn't have it otherwise. But these are hardly groundbreaking ideas. Of course we want our novelists to be storytellers above all, and I think that's precisely what D'Souza wants to be. I just wish more of this story were as gripping as the terrible tale of the slaves, the Jesuits, the Hindus and the raw pork. Geoff Nicholson's nonfiction book 'The Lost Art of Walking' will be published later this year. -- All histories are elaborate efforts at mythmaking. Therefore, when we submit to histories about us written by others, we submit to their myths about us as well. Mythmaking, like naming, is a token of power. Submitting to others' myths about us is a sign that we are without power. -- Claude Alvares
