Junior Edition #27

There’s strong competition out there, some dating back to the mists of time, but it must be conceded that Ireland scales the greatest heights of tale-spinning, myth-making, folktale-founding, shenanigans-following, and purely great storytelling. As Irish as they come, and as delightfully adept at writing for kids as for adults, is Dublin’s Roddy Doyle. In Brilliant he high-gears his gift for fresh metaphors, for giving comprehensible form to ineffable emotions, and for spinning the gold of joy out of the dross of life’s pervasive inequities.

So it was that, when the past decade’s burst-bubble economic depression hit his homeland, and with it wide-spread emotional depression (in a nation no stranger to the evil wages of being down-in-the-dumps), he turned to his talent for zany uplift.  Brilliant brilliantly explains such a darkening picture to those sharply affected yet probably very confused about the dour changes around them. Would Roddy Doyle spout dry economics lessons or disquisitions on psychology? Not brilliant. Skipping in the opposite direction, he draws on the best traditions of the children’s literature of the British Isles, sub-category fantasy and heart-stopping adventures laced with humor, to deal with urgent questions at his most encouraging—and realistic.

Smack in the middle of the to-do are Raymond (aka “Rayzer”) and Gloria Kelly.  When their beloved Uncle Ben’s painting and decorating business goes bust and he’s forced to move in with their family—where there are already hushed “mumblings” about mortgages and other specters hanging over this working-class home—they simultaneously start to notice something odd and ominous all around. A musty darkness puts them in mind of black dogs. But they know only playful and silly ones. When the gloom starts to form a low-hanging cloud in the shape of a creepy canine over the whole of Dublin, they feel not just their neighbors’ and friends’ but their own strength and merriment starting to dissipate, and their greatest, most secret fears bearing down (don’t get Rayzer started on the dark). Nonetheless, they still manage to insert the expression “brilliant”—possibly the most over-used word in England, Scotland and Ireland combined—into every chip of conversation, even as it threatens to deteriorate morosely into sardonic, sarcastic and downright disillusioned outbreaks. Leave it to their ancient Gran, also crammed into their small dwelling, to recognize the ghostly apparition. “The Black Dog of Depression” bares its deadly teeth at the worst periods of people’s—or cities’ and countries’—lives. To make matters more surreal and unbearable, this Black Dog has also stolen Dublin’s funny bone. Take Gran’s word for it.

How can Rayzer and Gloria not take matters into their own hands: to hunt down the Black Dog and get rid of it for good. Initially sallying forth with the sole company of their dotty, wise-cracking neighbor, Ernie, newly self-employed (at least as far as costuming and jokes are concerned) as a vampire, their audacity swerves off into a different metamorphosis of the compromised power of “brilliant.“ Adapting itself quite neatly, when it’s uttered now—or shouted or trilled just right—it causes bursts of light and laughter that set the Black Dog quaking in his fiendish intentions.

As Doyle unspools his fearsome yet not infrequently hilarious tale (his funny bone is intact), it becomes a kind of reverse “Pied Piper of Hamlin.” Scores, then hundreds, then thousands of kids—from every part of the city and every class—join up, a swarm of young fighters zeroing in on a shifty enemy. Shifty and then some: almost too late they arrive at the realization that the Black Dog is luring them away from the city in order to deprive his adult victims of any hope or purpose. Rayzer and company make an about-face, to stop the Black Dog in his relentless, elusive tracks. To Dublin’s relief and salvation, its funny bone is retrieved along with some time-tested acumen. Hunters can become the hunted, life is not always a bed of blarney, varieties of love and loyalty (and shy adolescent crushes) can overcome a great deal, and trust your instincts around Roddy Doyle. Apparently St. Patrick does.

Chitra Viraraghavan’s The Americans, isn’t your grandmother’s patchwork quilt. It’s a present-day kantha, an embroidered Indian coverlet stitched together from layers of delicate, worn saris. As such, each of Viraraghavan’s eleven characters gets numerous short, eponymous chapters, appearing in a seemingly jumbled sequence and with only hints about the truth and circumstances of each. Gradually accumulating, they pose the vertiginous challenge of gleaning a sense of the whole from these many-threaded tales.

Yet The Americans is also completely American—its reference to Henry James’s The American perversely underlining an account of new lives being led, for different amounts of time, both permanently and more fleetingly, in the New World. Viraraghavan—a great-granddaughter of the second President of India—mines the diverse plenitude of Indian immigrants that has flowed into our midst. Their aspirations are high, whether professionally, intellectually or (very) materialistically, though also often tamped down by personal failings or setbacks—or the very fact that America is not India, and, for better or worse, never will be.

As with all families or clans, but particularly with immigrants, the chasm between generations grows wider on new soil, beckoning young people—and, in one case, a very much older one—to embrace rebelliously a seductive culture grasping at their attention. Viraraghavan gets just right (and to a midriff-baring tee) the boundary-crashing teenage daughter of successful, staunchly Indian parents, and also, with painful perfection, her autistic younger brother. A common national background also proves a minefield for a young, dreamy poet eking out a living working in a gaudy Little India restaurant for a band of old-school thugs. Suddenly witness to the underage sex slavery of girls bought and brought from India, his impulse to act the savior reaches just halfway—one of the novel’s two suicides occurs on his despairing watch. Another, a brilliant web technician, gives in to a paranoid fantasy about government surveillance and murderous bigotry that not even a caring older friend can dispel. She is Tara, a professor of English and American literature, who has come to visit her sister, Rahul and Lavi’s mother. More than anyone, she’s connected to essentially all the other characters, to their unifying welter of tight and loose relationships.

In the global burst of immigration (and the current mass migrations of desperate refugees), putting down new roots has no single method—certainly not for the fluid, uneasy Tara. Or the elderly, gracious “CLN” (his full name is revealed late in his story), who can’t figure out why his daughter has, for the first time, demanded he travel to see her in situ—New Jersey—though it slowly becomes clear.

He also doesn’t know why he should stay.  The change lies in the new world of India. “’I notice,’” he says to a solicitous local librarian,  “’that people are happier being independent at home and feeling connected to the larger community, rather than here, where they tend to feel somewhat isolated’.”

How horrified the “Americans” in this novel would be at that pronouncement. It takes a village to raise a child. And at the very least it takes would-be Americans a generation to attain social and emotional citizenship. Whether they want to or not.