In her fourth novel, bestselling author Shilpi Somaya Gowda continues her empathic exploration of Indian American immigrant identity and experience. The central characters of A Great Country unexpectedly find themselves at the intersection of some of the nation’s most perilous social and political fault lines.
The novel opens on a Saturday night at a dinner party held to welcome Ashok and Priya Shah to their new neighborhood in Southern California’s wealthy Pacific Hills. The Shahs arrived in the U.S. some 20 years ago as penniless students and worked “their way up the socioeconomic ladder, as they were expected to as new immigrants.” This new life in the hills is a financial stretch, but they hope they can convince their longtime friends, also at the dinner, to make the move as well.
Meanwhile, the Shahs’ U.S.-born children are in trouble. Oldest daughter Deepa, a junior in high school, is being detained with her friend Paco after a protest at the U.S.-Mexico border turned violent. Their middle child, Maya, finds herself preoccupied with the Bakers, the Shahs’ extremely wealthy neighbors. And their 12-year-old son, Ajay, has just landed in jail, suspected of being a terrorist after flying a home-built drone next to the airport.
It’s Ajay’s arrest that sets the plot rolling like a ricocheting ball in a pinball machine. Ajay is scientifically gifted, brown skinned and tall enough to look older than he is. He might long ago have been diagnosed as autistic except that his father resisted the “culture of overdiagnosis in this country.” Ajay is misidentified by the press as a Muslim. The family is embarrassed when activists against police brutality take up their cause. Their inner domestic lives are blasted open in a media frenzy that makes most of their new neighbors suspicious of them.
If this sounds like a lot, it is. But somehow, in A Great Country, it mostly works. Gowda is superb at plotting and pacing, and the book spirits readers along. At the same time we learn enough of the histories of her characters to slow down and understand their dilemmas and the deep emotional stress these events place the family under. We feel for them and we will continue to think about them. Which, really, is just about the best we can hope for from a good read.
