I enjoy reading your take on this novel, Henry. I just finished it a week or two ago, and it's one of my favorite books I've read this year.
Regarding her style, I think the use of language in the initial two paragraphs you quoted is actually wonderful in ways that I can't entirely articulate except to say the use of vocabulary, the use of punctuation to create syntactic effect, and the details to give a sense of the place—I think they are fantastic. So coming into this novel with no sense of Kiran Desai as a writer, I would say she very much writes with a style that appeals to me at the sentence level, in addition to everything else (humor, misfortune, storytelling, pacing, sense of place, critiques/insights into American culture, etc.).
P.S. I also want to say that having walked and walked and walked all over New York City, her depiction of this city is spot on.
Terrific piece that explains why The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is so captivating and also why so many current novels feel so empty. This book was definitely not “work-shopped” by the “lapidarians” and it is better for it.
I've read two kinds of reviews about this novel, and yours has convinced me I ought to give it a go. The language can get sloppy, I think, and I agree that sometimes it's to good effect, but sometimes it misses (the "feline leukemia" reference in one passage jerked me right out of the paragraph -- it seemed forced and false) -- but if the overall feel works, that's good.
One important aspect of prose is rhythm. It's sort of like music. Hemingway's prose does have rhythm -- it's almost "catchy". Maybe it's like Bach in the Well-Tempered Clavier? And Desai's prose that you cite has a different rhythm -- maybe like the late Romantics, Brahms or Tchaikovsky, say. That could be a stretch! The worst of today's minimalists don't have rhythm, they just have correctness.
I haven't read Scott since I read Ivanhoe as a teen (probably an abridged version though I didn't know that than), so I can't speak to a comparison with him; but I've been reading and loving Trollope lately, and perhaps he would be a good comparison? Both his somewhat wandering narrative viewpoint, and his unbeautiful but effect prose.
Very good, it’s tipping me into reading this long book.
I think Rachel Cusk finding the “making things up” aspect of fiction “fake and embarrassing” quite odd.
It brings to mind this from the introduction to Nabokov’s “Lectures on Literature”:
Nabokov asked the students to explain in writing why they had enrolled in the course. At the next class he approvingly reported that one student had answered, "Because I like stories."
However, I was dismayed at the comments section! So many people disparaged her style calling it overdone, turgid, pretentious. One commentor drafted the following: " 'It was for them a junction, not of heart and mind, but of sinew and synapse, a reflex of reflux, an acid that ate and yet wanted for feeding, a need, nay a knot, gordian in nature, a tangle woven through time, and timeless, unmoored by physical realities, keeled in the mire of human sick, putrid and foul, sublime and unrequited…they called this love.'
That’s not from this book - but it probably should be."
And several others applauded that this mocking passage captured how badly 'overwritten' the book was. This seems evidence that these readers aren't paying attention to what Desai is actually doing. The mocking passage is all conceptual gobbledygook; I find this nowhere in the novel. The fecundity of her style illuminates the tangible and brings you closer to the the sensory experiences of life.
Like you, Henry, I felt like this was a return to a form of the novel that is life-affirming. Sigh!
I have a sense that diaspora is a permanent condition of literature now because it is a condition of so much of the world, and Naipaul was one of the first novelists of this condition in his early Trinidad novels and beyond. Ever searching, questioning, questing. The enigma of arrival, where he arrives at a place he becomes intertwined with, the seasons and life and landscape and people, at last, a home, and yet....
I enjoy reading your take on this novel, Henry. I just finished it a week or two ago, and it's one of my favorite books I've read this year.
Regarding her style, I think the use of language in the initial two paragraphs you quoted is actually wonderful in ways that I can't entirely articulate except to say the use of vocabulary, the use of punctuation to create syntactic effect, and the details to give a sense of the place—I think they are fantastic. So coming into this novel with no sense of Kiran Desai as a writer, I would say she very much writes with a style that appeals to me at the sentence level, in addition to everything else (humor, misfortune, storytelling, pacing, sense of place, critiques/insights into American culture, etc.).
P.S. I also want to say that having walked and walked and walked all over New York City, her depiction of this city is spot on.
Terrific piece that explains why The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is so captivating and also why so many current novels feel so empty. This book was definitely not “work-shopped” by the “lapidarians” and it is better for it.
I've read two kinds of reviews about this novel, and yours has convinced me I ought to give it a go. The language can get sloppy, I think, and I agree that sometimes it's to good effect, but sometimes it misses (the "feline leukemia" reference in one passage jerked me right out of the paragraph -- it seemed forced and false) -- but if the overall feel works, that's good.
One important aspect of prose is rhythm. It's sort of like music. Hemingway's prose does have rhythm -- it's almost "catchy". Maybe it's like Bach in the Well-Tempered Clavier? And Desai's prose that you cite has a different rhythm -- maybe like the late Romantics, Brahms or Tchaikovsky, say. That could be a stretch! The worst of today's minimalists don't have rhythm, they just have correctness.
I haven't read Scott since I read Ivanhoe as a teen (probably an abridged version though I didn't know that than), so I can't speak to a comparison with him; but I've been reading and loving Trollope lately, and perhaps he would be a good comparison? Both his somewhat wandering narrative viewpoint, and his unbeautiful but effect prose.
Very good, it’s tipping me into reading this long book.
I think Rachel Cusk finding the “making things up” aspect of fiction “fake and embarrassing” quite odd.
It brings to mind this from the introduction to Nabokov’s “Lectures on Literature”:
Nabokov asked the students to explain in writing why they had enrolled in the course. At the next class he approvingly reported that one student had answered, "Because I like stories."
Loved your review and also loved AO Scott's breakdown of a passage in the NYTs: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/02/books/loneliness-sonia-sunny-kiran-desai-10-best-books.html
However, I was dismayed at the comments section! So many people disparaged her style calling it overdone, turgid, pretentious. One commentor drafted the following: " 'It was for them a junction, not of heart and mind, but of sinew and synapse, a reflex of reflux, an acid that ate and yet wanted for feeding, a need, nay a knot, gordian in nature, a tangle woven through time, and timeless, unmoored by physical realities, keeled in the mire of human sick, putrid and foul, sublime and unrequited…they called this love.'
That’s not from this book - but it probably should be."
And several others applauded that this mocking passage captured how badly 'overwritten' the book was. This seems evidence that these readers aren't paying attention to what Desai is actually doing. The mocking passage is all conceptual gobbledygook; I find this nowhere in the novel. The fecundity of her style illuminates the tangible and brings you closer to the the sensory experiences of life.
Like you, Henry, I felt like this was a return to a form of the novel that is life-affirming. Sigh!
It is a real marmite book yes
a pleasure to read this review, Henry
Naipaul references are fascinating.
I have a sense that diaspora is a permanent condition of literature now because it is a condition of so much of the world, and Naipaul was one of the first novelists of this condition in his early Trinidad novels and beyond. Ever searching, questioning, questing. The enigma of arrival, where he arrives at a place he becomes intertwined with, the seasons and life and landscape and people, at last, a home, and yet....
Beautiful review. Deepens my appreciation of the book. I have changed my own writing over the years to make it concise, this post made me rethink.
When I started reading Desais books I found myself editing the sentences but with Sunny and Sonia I was happy to go along with her imagination.
Loved the book and loved the review, Henry, illuminating my enjoyment of it