Meet Anjali Bose—victim of patriarchy, caste, and her own whims; ingénue of postcolonial aspiration and desperation; cynosure of destiny, her own and everyone else's; and, yes, the backwater-born heroine of Bharati Mukherjee's latest novel.

Meet, too, while you're making acquaintances, Anjali's earliest influences, those whose great expectations she basks in and founders under: a set of tradition-rigid parents and a bitter older sister; a brutal, ardent suitor and a fond, peculiar expat-turned-teacher. Don't trouble, though, over their names. Everyone in Miss New India, save its many-named namesake, Anjali/Angela/Angie/Anjolie, is, if not a flat character, a papier-mâché one.

Besides, Anjali promptly leaves these characters behind in the mofussils (read: the sticks), heading unaccompanied to the big city. She does not depart her hometown immediately, though. After graduating from high school, she spends a year or so humoring her parents, idly entertaining their wish that she marry, and indolently dreaming about remaking herself in Bangalore. Ignorance makes such whimsy hazy, but, without fail, Anjali pictures herself working at a call center, dating men too sophisticated for her, and wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with the names of bands she's actually heard rather than, as is her present lot, wearing tee-shirts featuring bands she admires based solely on the arcane geography of their concert tours.

When she does quit Guaripur, appalled by an act of sudden violence, Anjali "compose[s] a note and le[aves] it in her mother's 'just in case' lentils jar," buys a bus ticket, and sheds everything familiar. Equipped only with a "halogen smile" and nineteen years of relative in-experience, with a stack of borrowed rupee notes and passable English, she goes to seek her fortune in Bangalore, the big, unfinished city, the hub of American outsourcing. Along the way, she swoons just as a handsome stranger happens by. She becomes chummy with terrorists and thieves. She inspires photographers and suicides.

If it all sounds a bit much, that's because it is.

Indeed, when one of Anjali's admirers counsels her, on the far, harrowed side of a sachet of luckless—shockingly, implausibly luckless—coincidences, "Let's just say you've completed a reality tv episode," the problem is this: the reader can go along with that reductive version of the novel's plot without batting an eye, even if its heroine, an intermittently penitent flirt, can't.

Which is not, however, to say that Miss New India's India is a just a set. On the contrary, Mukherjee's Bangalore is mirror-bright. So, of course, is its counterpart, the real Bangalore, the actual seat of the neocolonial landmarks whose names the writer points up: "Electronics City, Phase I and Phase II," for instance, as well as "Dollar Colony," a subdivision christened—guilelessly and cynically, out of a scorn that borders pride—by its wealthy inhabitants' drivers.

Whatever she borrows from Bangalore itself, though, Mukherjee also deploys original ironies in rendering the city. She tacks up a sign reading "English Lessens" on Anjali's route through the metropolis. She puts the words "Quitters never win, and winners never quit" into the mouths of the students at Bangalore's premier English-language school, thereby inventing a pronunciation drill that compels the New Indian to parrot an American mantra—and one no American, no matter how doggedly opposed to quitting, ever would. She also twice invokes the film Chinatown, forging an apt comparison between Los Angeles and Bangalore, undoubtedly, but also winking askance at Orientalism and its clumsy generalizations.

Moreover, no sooner does Anjali arrive in Bangalore than Mukherjee boards her, this "Miss New India," with the British Raj's second-to-last widow. True, the novelist sometimes takes this old lady—caked and pickled and steeped in vanity and nostalgia and distrust—as an excuse to push Anjali's encounter with the historic toward the histrionic. On the other hand, where the estate's secrets are slowly told and unremarked, they edge quietly toward the iconic. Consider the squatters, whose "nighttime coughing and throat clearing of rural India" disrupt the sleep of the dowager in whose back thicket (once a Victorian garden) they camp, waiting, like the city's real estate agents and architects, for the old woman's death to leave the Anglo-Indian mansion up for grabs.

Likewise, Mukherjee's description of Anjali's hometown, Gauripur, smacks of accuracy. One need look no further than Pinky Mahal, "the town's three-story monument to urban progress," a sadly plastered office building-qua-bazaar that, originally, a watercolorist's elevation promised would be taller and finer.

And yet, however thickly textured her version of Gauripur, Mukherjee's habitual underrating of her reader's aptitude cheapens her prose. In detailing Pinky Mahal, for instance, the novelist belabors the differences between the "epic portrait" developers once pasted to the town's premier billboard, on the one hand, and, on the other, the building that a contractor actually slapped together (and left to its incremental collapse). A sampling: "Fanciful renderings of a future that would never come." "And so Pinky Mahal […] had become an eyesore rather than a proud monument in the center of town." "When Pinky Mahal failed, the spirit of Gauripur was crushed."

Such gratuitous and sometimes trite commentary spoils what could be incisive, descriptive poetry in other instances, too. Take the transparent mirage that Anjali notices in the middle of her long trip to Bangalore; she sees "throbbing diesel clouds off a metallic ocean of dented bus roofs." The image is gorgeous and fruitless. It is also enough. But Mukherjee cannot let the image alone, so her narrator blurts out a cliché d rejection of a cliché. "This was the first morning of her life," the text reads, "but it felt like death."

I can imagine the counter-arguments, the justifications for Miss New India's sometimes cliché d prose and far-fetched vicissitudes of plot. With regard to the novel's style, that justification runs something like this. Anjali Bose, like many of those equipped with a rudimentary education and a keen mind, hoards and repeats others' most striking phrases. For example, she trots out a privileged photographer's comment about "light and angles" at several opportune moments, and she repurposes aphorisms, too, from her teacher at Vasco da Gama High School. She cannot, however, quite sift the profound from the facile, particularly in English. So Miss New India, a novel given to some free indirect discourse, is, in kind, uneven—a concoction of poetry and jargon, banality and acuity.

Similarly, to defend the novel's extravagant storyline, one might point to the plots most familiar to Anjali—the pinched lives taking place in Gauripur (or wherever poverty forfeits honor) and the preposterous biographies narrated in Bollywood movies. Indeed, when Mukherjee's heroine conjures up—at the least provocation—a romantic future for herself, the narrator remarks, "She'd seen this movie a hundred times." That few lives are so simple as to fit neatly into one or the other template or to ricochet, as Anjali's does, between the two seems lost on Mukherjee, whose other novels, too, tend toward melodrama.

Only occasionally, however, will an academic accuse the novelist of candying the suffering she describes—noting that she routinely grants her heroines the gifts of caste and beauty, protesting that too often she lends hardship to something more lurid. Generally, Mukherjee's books garner high praise. And I wanted, for my part, to be fond of this one, particularly as I think her novel Holder of the World stunning, a smart antidote to American literature's—and its scholars'—worst habits.

What, then, distinguishes Holder of the World (for example) from Miss New India? Both narratives, after all, countenance hugely unlikely coincidences. I find that the difference between them lies in this: at her best, Mukherjee acknowledges the unlikelihood of the coincidences on which her plots pivot. At her best, she poses the stories she crafts as telling exceptions, checks to the canon or conventional wisdom, rather than as cases in (some general) point.

As for Miss New India, it over-generalizes from its title on. The novel, in turn, implies that abuse is indispensable to ambition, that charisma is tantamount to character, and that adventure is vital to understanding. Of course, such false lessons are familiar enough already. They stand as morals common to those stories counterfeited as reality TV.

So while the fact that Anjali's exploits could be mistaken for the plot of a reality tv show—a possibility floated, you will remember, by one of the book's own characters—does not redound to Miss New India's credit, it is, in the end, only a minor flaw. How could it not be, when plenty of writers, from Sophocles to Dickens to (at least once) Mukherjee, have wrung truths from overwrought plots? But Miss New India does not aspire to parable or to counter-narrative. Rather, it masquerades as case study, and, as case study, it fails. It fails, specifically, because it casts every Indian twentysomething as destiny-ridden Anjali Bose's "sister," conveniently forgetting Anjali Bose's actual sister: plainer, poorer, more gradually wronged, less fervently championed.

That said, Miss New India would fail as a parable, too.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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