Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane has received an obscene amount of praise from Western critics. Surprisingly, it is well-earned.
As with much diasporic literature, Brick Lane is a migrant bildungsroman with a female protagonist, Nazneen, whose inner transformations sketch the milieu of London’s Bangla town in the East End. We watch Nazneen as she goes from a tiny East Pakistani village to a squalid marriage-flat, home to her ineffectual older husband Chanu, consummate self-improvement junkie and bore, whose corns she must dutifully trim each night. She seems resigned at first, seeing her life as nothing but “a series of gnawings, ill-defined and impossible to satisfy”—until various factors come into play, from the death of her infant son, to the adolescent tribulations of daughters Shahana and Bibi (whom Chanu traps in “the eternal three-way-torture of
daughter-father-daughter”), to her short-lived affair with middleman and youthful radical Kareem. Despite being uneducated, Nazneen is sharply observant. Seen through her eyes, the characters of Brick Lane are, in fact, its greatest joy. Here we meet Mrs. Islam the gangster hypochondriac; brave Razia; beautiful Hasina and her misadventures in Bangladesh; hapless Kareem as the second generation in-between, the Bengal Tigers,
etcetera etcetera. However, it is Chanu who is the most human, and to a certain extent, the most loveable. (Indeed, this literature major can more than relate to his intellectual pretensions and its frailties and failures. And even Nazneen herself is taken aback by the depth of her husband’s friendship with Dr. Azad, which despite being rooted in migrant schadenfreude, is as strong as any.) Amidst the conflicts and contradictions faced by the ghettoized Bangla migrant in the post-9/11 context, Nazneen finally takes responsibility for herself, as migrant and woman, as mother and wife. At the age of 34 she pries herself from the jaws of fate,“startled by her own agency as an infant who waves a clenched fist and strikes itself upon the eye”—thus achieving a hybrid migrant-dream as a sari-clad woman flying on the ice.