FUGUE STATES NO ‘SILLY ROMP’
Novel mixes comedy, melancholy, need for rooted life
Fugue States Pasha Malla Knopf
TORONTO Pasha Malla is a rising literary star whose new novel, Fugue States, is one of the most eagerly waited events of the Canadian publishing year.
But that’s not all that’s interesting about him.
He’s also prepared to speak his mind — to a refreshing degree. He has questioned the value of the Internet, suggesting it “has done more to alienate people and fracture human relations than to connect us with one another.” And he worries about “cronyism” within Canada’s literary culture.
He’s ready to confront his detractors. Critic-bashing remains rare within the tiptoe decorum of our country’s literary establishment, but that didn’t deter Malla from taking a swipe at some of the negative reviews that greeted his 2012 novel, People Park.
The world he created here, conjured Nostromo-like out of his own fertile imagination, was shortlisted for Amazon Canada’s First Novel award and received outstanding reviews. As for those critics who didn’t like it — well, Malla felt they hadn’t done their homework.
“Calling some of those people ‘critics’ seems generous,” he said in an interview five years ago. He complained of criticism that was “deeply insipid and illiterate and lazy.”
So does this constitute arrogance? Not really. In fact, if you ask Malla about it now, he stands by those harsh words but in a disarmingly mild-mannered way.
“The job of the reviewer is to try to figure out what the writer is trying to do and see how well they’re doing it,” he tells Postmedia. (Aristotle couldn’t have said it better.) “I think there are many legitimate criticisms of that book, but for an alleged reviewer to read it carelessly and not give some amount of thought to what’s been put into it — that’s bad criticism and bad reviewing. It’s lazy.”
It’s also characteristic of Malla that he should employ the portal he enjoys as a columnist and blogger to examine Canada’s hothouse literary culture and the cronyism it can foster. A couple of years ago he went so far as to ask publicly whether it was proper for him to review a book by a friend.
“It didn’t really spark the discussion I was hoping it would,” he says now. “I thought I was kind of owning up to something in order to get people to talk about the advantages they can have, based on who they know and who they hang out with. But I don’t really feel the conversation went that way.”
This thoughtful young Newfoundlander is really talking about the integrity of an art form here — and he’s by no means confident about his own place within it. His new novel, Fugue States, published by Knopf, is a witty but probing examination of identity, which reaches its picaresque conclusion in the disputed Indian state of Kashmir. But it took Malla more than half a decade to complete.
“I don’t write quickly,” he says, almost apologetically. “It’s so different from much of what I’ve written before. I found the basic mechanics kind of difficult — the mechanics of realism — and this kind of tool kit is not one I’ve reached into that often as a writer.”
This is a novelist Publishers Weekly has hailed as “a fabulously gifted writer.” Yet, Malla seems wary of success — so much so that when he won the coveted Trillium Book Award some 10 years ago for his short story collection, The Withdrawal Method, his acceptance speech seemed almost a diversionary tactic, remembered by many today for a digression into the glories of the Disney animated film Up.
“Actually, I think I only talked about Up for 10 minutes,” Malla laughs. But he is suspicious of success as something foisted on him by forces over which he has no control.
“For me, success certainly doesn’t have anything to do with sales or awards or any of that stuff. That’s not how I would gauge success. Maybe some writers do, but it’s not the metric by which I would measure my own happiness.”
Born in Newfoundland to a Kashmiri father and an English mother, and now in exile in mainland Canada — well, yes, this can suggest an interesting combination for a creative artist. And it’s reflected in the expertly managed fusion of comedy and melancholy that drives his new novel.
The story focuses on a critical turning point in the lives of Ash Dhar, an unfulfilled Toronto broadcaster coping with the sudden death of his India-born father, and Matt, his blundering, socially inept but loyal pothead buddy.
The discovery of a strange personal document among his deceased father’s effects — a seeming work of fiction set in Kashmir — sets Ash wondering about its meaning and also about his own Indian heritage. The story sees both Ash and the childlike Matt ending up in Kashmir — a place that leaves Ash stricken with temporary amnesia, a condition that provides one clue, but not the only one, to the book’s tantalizing title.
Malla sees various influences for the book — including a protagonist who is “a less satisfied version of myself because he doesn’t really write and exists on the periphery of other people’s writing.” There’s also the importance of Kashmir “and certainly my own dad’s experience of living in exile for much of his life.
“But I was also trying to write a book about homelessness and rootlessness, not in the sense of street people, but in the sense of people who have never felt at home,” he says.
“So I think that’s the central idea — how these people try to create homes, create stable identities where they can look for reinforcement of who they really are, and how these can be false narratives as well. That’s one of the things the book is about. But it’s also about grief.”
Malla is sounding pretty precise here. But ask what he hopes readers will take from it, and he becomes more cautious.
“I’m done writing the book,” he says quietly. “People can take what they want, I suppose. I’d like people to be entertained, but I hope there are thoughtful things in it about masculinity, misogyny and colonialism. It’s not just meant to be a silly romp.”
I found the basic mechanics kind of difficult — the mechanics of realism — and this kind of tool kit is not one I’ve reached into that often as a writer.