“Everything I do,” Taddeo says, “is so that if I leave my daughter too early — the way my parents did — I’ll leave her with enough. ... In a sense, every book is what I’ve learned — like, here’s what you should know about life that I won’t have been able to teach you.”
What she has to teach is not reassuring, but it is true, even when it’s fiction. In her new book, “Animal” — her first published novel — the narrator is also telling her daughter a story. Joan has uprooted her life in New York City after witnessing the brutal suicide of her married lover. Desperate for a new beginning, she drives across the country and settles in a sort-of commune in the hills of Topanga, where she and a few other lost souls rent shacks and yurts alongside the coyotes.
In the midst of an unusually hot New York City spring in 1945, Chief Magistrate Henry H. Curran was riding the metro downtown to a meeting at City Hall. Curran, the former commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York, and former president of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, had forgotten to bring his copy of the paper that morning. As a result, he found himself reading the various ads surrounding him on the colorful New York City subway.
Curran tried to focus on different advertisements to distract himself from the heat, and from his growing restlessness. Until, that is, one particular ad seized his attention. It was an ad for the “New-York Historical Society.” Innocuous enough at first, it was the tiny piece of orthography that caught Curran’s eye and sent a wave of heat through his body. Was that—could that be a hyphen? Sitting unabashedly between the words New and York? The anti-hyphenate politician was furious.
I asked him why he had decided to swim there. Given that a year ago, a sewage spill had dumped more than 2 million tons of waste into the river and the Long Island Sound, and signs had been posted telling people not to get close, I imagined he would address my surprise head-on. But his response was remarkably unneurotic. “This was here, and I felt like swimming,” he said dreamily. I wanted to ask him whether he was worried about getting a rash, or cholera, but didn’t. After he left, I put my hand in the water and considered the river anew. Could I imagine myself going for a swim in this spot?
I’m unashamed to say that this novel made me weep and, despite not containing an ounce of didacticism, it offers profound insight into the impact of conditional love on a “looked-after” child. “There’s something wrong with being in care, the care system, and it’s to do with making us into a transaction,” Bess says. Capes is a rare new talent, and she has written something very special here: a novel that transforms, with the lightest of touches.
While the novel implicitly critiques the myth of the model Asian American minority, it’s not interested in how this myth is used to harm other communities in the United States. Rather, it focuses on how nonsensically this myth is deployed when society speaks of youthful Indian American achievement. This achievement is not anything inherent, the novel suggests, but rather the result of an immigrant inheritance, the gossipy stew of others’ ambitions and punishing expectations. As a whole, the novel is a disturbingly accurate look at the social foibles of a particular subset of upper-middle-class Indian American — principally Hindu American — strivers.