Curry’s struggle worth the effort
ESSAYS Reading five-essay book is like watching author kick his way out of box taped shut
Curry is a struggle. It’s a struggle for the writer, who is trying to write his way out of a set of expectations and reflexes that stand between him, what he wants to write and how he wants to be read. And it’s a struggle for the reader, who has to dodge repeated authorial self-recriminations and second guesses.
Reading this small, five-essay book is like watching Naben Ruthnum, a Canadian-born writer of Indo-Mauritian heritage, try to kick his way out of a box that’s been very neatly taped quite shut.
It’s frustrating, and not always pleasant. There are moments when he gets a foot through and you think he’s got it licked, only to realize his leg’s now stuck, and he’s no closer to getting out of that thing than he was when he started. You may find yourself wishing he’d brought a utility knife with him.
But stick with it, because it’s not a show you get to see often. Usually, people like Ruthnum — writers, actors, musicians, executives, customer service representatives, presidents who have an identity that is not cis, white, straight, ablebodied, and middle- or upper class — do their box-kicking backstage and only come out once they’ve managed to extricate themselves as much as they’ve been able. Sure, there are books and plays and TV shows about characters who struggle this way, but those are stories. Curry is life.
These essays — which join a political and cultural Zeitgeist that includes Kamal Al Solyalee’s Brown, Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick, and Hasan Minhaj’s standup — use food, travel, movies, literature and cookbooks to try to figure out, to paraphrase Sheila Heti, how should a South Asian person be.
Ruthnum picks apart Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Daniyal Mueenudin, Shoba Narayan, Madhur Jaffrey, and “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” with a thoughtful ambivalence that exhibits an admirable intellectual honesty.
Ruthnum, born in 1982, is at the beginning of his career, and his writing sometimes shows it. But he more than makes up for that and other infelicities (like his trouble with the definition of “disinterested”) with ample evidence of real verbal acuity and, more importantly, sharp observation and analysis, as when he points out that books often “signal their falseness by underlining their authenticity,” that Western urban dress was in his youth, as it is now, “so uniformly varied that individual distinctions became important only if you were looking through the crowd for someone you already knew,” or that “curry’s just as fake and as real as a great novel, as a sense of identity.”
Ruthnum won the 2013 Journey Prize for his short story, “Cinema Rex,” and will be publishing a crime novel under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley (the racial implications of which he discusses) next year. Though Coach House Books’ admirable Exploded Views series, which they describe as “punchy salvos,” is about the only place I can imagine publishing something as unapologetically procedural as this, I hope Ruthnum doesn’t leave non-fiction behind entirely.