In the National, Ed Lake reviews “In the Kitchen” by Monica Ali (Doubleday)
In retrospect, nobody came out of l’affaire Brick Lane very well. Monica Ali’s first novel was published in 2003 to simultaneous fanfare and denunciation. The author was already a star; Granta had named her one of Britain’s best young novelists on the strength of her unpublished manuscript. And the book, when it came, seemed to do what was asked of it: its portrait of life among Bangladeshi immigrants in East London was celebrated by a largely white critical fraternity as a dispatch from Britain’s alienated and increasingly radical Islamic contingent. The Scotsman wrote that it opened “a new and potentially rich seam in mainstream British fiction”. The Evening Standard praised its insights into a “fresh, rich and hidden world”. In short, it dished dirt, and in doing so assisted the commentariat in their grand inquiries. Ali’s vision of a small world beset by oppression, hypocrisy and militant posturing was taken to be authentic, which is to say, just bad enough to be true. And that, of course, is what many of the real Brick Lane’s Bangladeshis objected to.
The novel’s heroine, Nazneen, is an illiterate Sylhetti farm girl who finds herself married off as a teenager to Chanu, a council worker twice her age, who lives in the navel of the London borough of Tower Hamlets. Through Nazneen’s eyes we are shown a world of dank state housing, busybody neighbours and desperate boredom. Chanu is a failure though he doesn’t know it, blinded as he is by pride at his numerous certificates, his degree in English literature, and his Open University non-insights into colonial history. In one of Ali’s better – because bitter – jokes, she has Chanu announce grandly, with the clear intention to impress, that: “To be an immigrant is to live out a tragedy.” Despite cultivating aloofness from the old-country gaucheries of a faceless horde of “ignorant types”, he can’t get ahead at the office. He’s that recurring figure in the literature of the Indian diaspora, the would-be bourgeois, cousin to VS Naipaul’s Mr Biswas. The only way for him is down. More:
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