Rethinking a First Novel | The New Yorker

Writing is the core of my identity. It is a way of saying to the world “I am here.” But I have a hard time writing anything when I am scared. The noise in my mind becomes so loud that it is impossible to lose myself in the kind of dream state that inventing requires.

Unable to work on anything new, I opened my first novel. I had always felt ashamed that the book wasn’t as good as its characters deserved it to be. I love my characters. I spend so many years in their company that I know their voices, their gestures, their stories. Even if they are not decent people, I do not wish them suffering. Because I had published the book without fixing its problems, I felt as though I had betrayed them.

I began reading the book, and it was strange to encounter these characters again after almost twenty years. It was like seeing friends or relatives after a long time. Even if the people seem exactly as they used to be, you and your sense of the world have changed.

I started to think about how I could make the book good enough for its characters. I knew from the beginning that there was very little chance that a new version of the book would ever be published. I also knew that, even if it were published, I would get zero dollars for my work. After all, what publishers in their right mind would republish a book that had taken years to earn back its small advance? Still, I worked on the book every day. I think this was, in part, a way of assuaging the guilt I felt about my marriage having ended. I could not fix the hurts that the collapse of the marriage had caused, but I could do right by the characters in my novel. I have always viewed writing fiction as moral work, but never before had it felt so urgent. It was as if I were in the grip of a compulsion.

In the first version of “An Obedient Father,” many of the characters had names that started with the same letter: Asha and Anita; Ram and Rajinder. The idea behind this was to force non-Indian readers to read closely to avoid confusion. The book is about a child molester, and it involves many things that are unpleasant. Slowing readers down was a way to make them spend more time with difficult subjects. (This was a trick I came up with while reading Dostoyevsky’s “Demons” and confusing the Russian names.)

One of the first things I did while revising the novel was to change the names of the characters so they started with different letters. This reduced the demands on the reader, thereby allowing a more empathetic immersion in the characters; when you are stressed, it is hard to step into other people’s feelings. This change, of course, had a hundred consequences. All the dialogue labels had to be reconsidered. In the first version of the book, because the characters were harder to separate from one another, dialogue labels were used not only to identify the characters in a conversation but to serve almost as a landing on a staircase where the reader could have a rest before moving on.

A much more complicated technical change had to do with how the chapters were organized. In the first version of the novel, the chapters end when some significant plot point occurs. The effect of this is to subliminally assert that outward life, the physical world and the way characters move around in it, should be the determinant of whether the novel is convincing. This, of course, makes no sense. When we look at our own lives, some parts seem much more real than others; the interior life is often more powerful than the public one. In the new version of the book, each chapter works out a particular set of issues. When those issues are resolved, a new chapter begins. This means that the novel feels less tethered to mimetic reality and instead takes its form from psychological and philosophical reality.

The greatest difference between the two versions has to do with the character of the sexually abused daughter. When I was in my early teens, I had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a much older woman. I always experienced guilt about this, as though I, rather than the adult, were responsible for the violation. To some extent, this guilt had made me identify with the child molester in the novel. Now, having matured and seen my marriage end partly because of what was done to me when I was a child, I wanted to give the victim in the novel much more space. Allowing her this completely changed the resonance of the story. She became a much more approachable character, and this caused the pain of the novel to deepen.