Chetna MarooBesprekingen

27. Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
OPD: 2023
format: 151-page hardcover
acquired: December read: Apr 29 – May 3 time reading: 3:48, 1.5 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Contemporary Fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: contemporary London and Edinburgh
about the author: A British Indian author born in Kenya, who lives in London.

A novel of wonderful rhythmic hypnotic prose. It took me a few sittings, but I found myself swept up in Gopi's world of grief and squash.

This is an unassuming novel on a grieving family of Jains in England. Jainism is an Indian religion akin to Hinduism, Sikhism, and even Buddhism. Their religious emphasis is non-violence and vegetarianism, none of which plays a direct role in the story. But the father takes pains to let his Pakistani friend know they are Jains, and so, different.

Sorry, where was I? The family is a dad and three very close sisters grieving over the recent loss of their mother. Her death hit the whole family hard and they try to make do. Dad is an electrician, so he has an income but not a big one. The older girls pick up some chores. And then Dad gets them into squash, more and more, eventually several hours a day. But while the older girls slowly back out of this training, the youngest daughter, Gopi, embraces it, taking to the sounds and rhythms of the play and the game flow and its strategies. She and her father watch the best squash players on a video cassette and discuss them. She is 11.

The entire book revolves around her world of squash, and her family's grieving. And while i knew to look for the rhythm, I didn't find it at first. For a bit it was just a regular book, and I set it aside a few days. Then I picked it up a four-hour flight and found myself deeply into it before I noticed the prose rhythms behind it. Yes, it's a nice story. But the telling is captivating. I got emotional in all the emotional spots. I fully bought in, sometimes slowing myself down so I could remember the reading, instead of the rush to finish. I was sad to finish.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386#8533089

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world.

Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a 13-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe. 

I really enjoyed Western Lane, shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. A beautiful, graceful book, short but unhurried, its a compelling tale of grief and compassion, family and competition.

https://quizlit.org/book-of-the-month-december-2023

I think this is a lovely story.

Thin and laboured. Struggling to see the beauty of the prose.

I can honestly say, this is the first family drama I have ever thoroughly enjoyed, one in which I truly liked ever character. I initially thought, the first family drama without an antagonist, but wait, there is one, Grief.
The story is told by 11 year old, Gopi, the youngest of three sisters. They and their Pa are struggling with the recent loss of mother and wife. Grief weighs heavily on them all and each has their own way of trying to reconcile with this loss.
For Gopi it is playing squash at Western Lane, a sports facility in England. Once a passion of her fathers, it is now Gobi's. Not only to please her father or to practice with 13 year old local boy, Ged, but as a sort of release.
Tensions run deep as they struggle but there is no denying it circles around the love each member has for each other.
Beautifully written and with so much feel it is hard to believe one can get so attached in a slim novel of only 150 pages. That's solid writing, in my opinion.

Seems all my Goodreads pals are rather underwhelmed with this one and I’m out on a limb by my lonesome here! No problem with that though.

Sometimes we need something to save us, and finding it, or something that will serve for it at any rate, we grasp hold tightly. This short novel explores that dynamic with great empathy, building care for characters who are completely unfamiliar to me in one sense (British-Indian Jains) though my fellow humans in the deeper more important sense, and through an activity in the sport of squash that was only slightly more recognizable to me than the mostly incomprehensible sport of cricket. This learning opportunity added additional interest in my case (I’ve read novels that describe cricket of course; nothing doing).

With connections to Claire Keegan and Yiyun Li one could expect Maroo to produce a certain sort of quiet detailed prose and this she mostly has done in this her debut. The father’s emotionally bottled up distance was painfully evoked in brief passages of text throughout, most notably. An emphasis on sound was another thing I noticed. Here in the very opening page sound, and its lack, are used to suggest the father’s distance, and that which saves.

My father was standing far back, waiting. I knew from his silence that he wasn’t going to move first, and all I could do was serve and volley or disappoint him. The smudges on the wall blurred one into the other and I thought that surely I would fall. That was when it started up. A steady, melancholy rhythm from the other court, the shot and its echo, over and over again, like some sort of deliverance. I could tell it was one person conducting a drill. And I knew who it was. I stood there, listening, and the sound poured into me, into my nerves and bones, and it was with a feeling of having been rescued that I raised my racket and served.

I enjoyed this more than the elaborately decorative prose of Harding, for sure, but we’ll see what else the Booker longlist has to offer!

Yes, this is a story about the game of squash. But its also a story of grief, love, family, support, and kindnesses.

After their mother dies, three sisters are left bereft, with a grieving father who does not know what to do. His brother and sil offer to take one of the girls to Scotland to live with them, but Pa resists. He decides that squash will save them--providing discipline, good exercise, goals, skills, learning. But he himself is lost, engaging in an emotional relationship with a white woman, a parent at the girls' school. It was unclear to me if she was in any kind of relationship other than being a supportive friend, neighbor, and fellow squash parent.

Gopi, the youngest sister, loves squash. And she is good at it. As her father continues to train her and she plays with others as well, he enters her in a tournament. Can they afford this? Pa has let grief and squash get the better of his business.

This is a very sweet and sad story--of a family trying to come together, of a school trying to show support, of the love of a game bringing people together and supporting Pa and his girls because of their awful circumstance.

Good narration!

A beautifully told story of a family struggling to come to terms with the grief of the loss of their wife and mother.

Gopi is eleven when her Ma dies, her sisters, Khush, thirteen and Mona, fifteen. Their father is uncertain of how to grieve the loss of his wife,and how to parent his children. Uncle Parvan and Aunt Ranjan visit , and offer to take one of the children. Their father decides that squash will be a way for the family to cope, and Gopi excels at this. Pa ( who remains unnamed throughout the book) becomes withdrawn, doesn't work and begins a relationship with a white woman, Linda.

This is a quiet, subtle , and very moving story.

Page 101 " I didn't know , then, that it was to the limping creature behind Pa's eyes that I should have been paying attention. Instead, I was thinking of the presence whose hold on Pa was slipping away, and the feeling that if it did, then our living room and our house and Western Lane and everything we knew would go with it."

4 stars.

Squash Dreams
Review of the Dreamscape Media LLC CD-audiobook (February 7, 2023) narrated by Maya Saroya of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux hardcover original (February 7, 2023).

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.

[2.5]
It was again a chance thing that led me to "read" the audiobook edition of another longlisted 2023 Booker nominee, after listening to a narration of Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time. While looking for the half-dozen or so Booker nominees currently available in Canada at the library, I found that a CD-audio edition was available immediately, as opposed to joining the long list of hold requests for a hardcopy. I fortunately still have a CD-player available (even in the car), and I suppose many do not.

Western Lane is a straightforward coming-of-age story, unlike Barry's stream-of-consciousness novel. I didn't need to access an e-book to assist in following along. The main character is 11-year-old Gopi, the youngest of 3 daughters in a South Asian UK family whose mother has recently passed. In his efforts to keep the girls occupied, the father encourages their squash court activities at a local sports centre named Western Lane. As further inspiration, they watch the videotaped matches of Jahangir Khan, widely acknowledged as the greatest squash player to have ever played the game, with an world-record setting 555-match winning streak.

Maroo's storytelling is very matter-of-fact and well-told but it didn't rise to a level of quotable literary passages that one would expect and look for in a Booker nominee. It does avoid pre-teen or teenage angst for the most part, so it definitely rises above being a simple YA tale. But it just didn't ignite any spark or passion for me. It all leads up to a final junior championship match and then it's over.

See illustration at https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/02/07/books/review/07MAROO/07MAROO-jumbo.jp...
Illustration by Femme ter Haar for the New York Times review of “Western Lane”. Image sourced from the New York Times (link below)

Perhaps I just have too little interest in competition sports, and zero knowledge of squash especially, to fully appreciate this novel. I had the same problem with Aravind Adiga's Selection Day which centred around cricket. Adiga at least saw the humour of cricket being a "false sport", played by only 8 countries in the world. There was little or no humour in Western Lane to lighten the journey for non-aficionados.

Other Reviews
Finding Solace from Grief on the Squash Court by Ivy Pochoda*, New York Times, February 7, 2023.
A Tender Debut by Caleb Klaces, The Guardian, April 23, 2023.

* Reviewer Ivy Pochoda (The Art of Disappearing, Visitation Street, These Women a.o.) was a professional squash player prior to becoming an author.

Trivia and Link
As I previously did not know anything about squash, it was interesting to discover than squash players train with a method called "ghosting" i.e. practicing moves on the court without an actual ball. There are plentiful "ghosting" videos on YouTube, and you can see one here.½

I feel like my recent book notes have been ultra critical. This one will be: because I don't know much about the sport of squash. This is a brief novel about sisters, grief for their mom, and squash. It's subtle, quiet, short. I would love to know how much of this book is related to the writer's life. But this book had moments that were wonderful and memorable. Kind of like pieces of a dream. But that means, I fear, they will quickly float away from my memory, like a dream. Not as noteworthy as I would like!

*Book #16/42 I have read of the Morning News Camp ToB½

This is a quiet and understated novel about an eleven year old Indian British girl whose mother recently died. Her father is told to find something to occupy her time, and that of her two older sisters and so the usual fun games of squash this family enjoyed becomes a training regimen. Gopi is the only one who shows promise; her oldest sister, Mona, has other concerns, not the least figuring out how to keep the family functioning, and Khush, the middle sister, lacks Gopi's dedication and talent. Squash is the way Gopi and her father communicate, watching famous matches and always training. She also trains with a boy whose mother works at the club where the courts are located, and before long she and the boy are focused on an upcoming tournament.

Most of this novel takes place between the lines, in the brief glimpses we catch of the members of this grieving family. Gopi does her best to do her part, in this case that means training hard and in the uncertainty of a family that has lost its center, squash provides her a refuge. This is a small book, both in scope and page count, but is beautifully told.

I understood what this book was trying to do, a coming of age story using squash as the vehicle. Handling the loss of the parent, coping with losing memories, etc. This small book should have take 1 to 2 days to read but instead I stretched it out to 4 or 5 days. I just couldn’t get into it.½