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A review by sarahetc
Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian
4.0
It's been a long time since I read genuine magical realism. This was lovely and refreshing most of the time. Especially the parts where they were grappling with the magical realism stuff. But alongside that there was a secondary novel that was deeply cynical to the point of nihilism and... no thanks.
Gold Diggers trades on its ability to get your head into a 2005 teens listening to Kanye and feeling the first flush of individuation space. Our narrator is Neil Narayan, a sophomore in High School. His older sister is Prachi. His best friends are an assortment of dudes, mostly South Asian. He's in love with Anita, his neighbor, also 15, and for the time being, in school with him. Shruti Patel is in love with him, probably, and all these kids are dealing with the normal pressures of their age-- school, first love, substance, sex, possible career, etc., while also dealing with their Indian Immigrant parents, who make no bones about how they risked, feared, suffered, and so forth, for an opportunity for their children to live in America and have the best possible lives-- which means straight A-Pluses, no exceptions, plus a coordinated, curated set of activities, extra-curriculars, and volunteer activities designed to get them into the Ivy League and from there, more Ivy League, and from there, to extensive wealth, marriage (possibly arranged), procreation, and the dreamiest possible American Dream. All without losing their Indian identities. Or having much of any input about what the study is of or the career is about. To say nothing of the spectre of arranged marriage. If it weren't so actual and documented, you'd think that was the magical realism.
Neil's crush and love for Anita is the kind that always has been and probably always will be-- formed before memory because they have always been neighbors and playmates. They have always had a life together, but high school has begun to pull them apart. Neil can't bring himself to give a shit about math and science. His heart is in his History and English classes. And those don't come with prestige or make money, so his parents tell him to quit with the nonsense and focus on his older sister, in the throes of both pageant season (she's hoping to become Miss India America Georgia) and waiting on her acceptance to Duke, which she is convinced has gone to a rival from another local high school. Neil is an afterthought-- to his parents, sister, friend group, debate team, and then finally to Anita. The person he can relate to is Anita's mother Anjali, and he doesn't know why. Sathian writes their relationship like the edge of a crush, but as the story progresses, she illuminates the connection between the two people who are ignored children of whom much is expected and little is given.
Neil is going about his melancholy life, taking in orders, directions, peer pressure, "nonsense," drama, and lust when he stumbles into Anjali and Anita's house to see them scrambling to redirect him, having caught them with a strangely glittering liquid, emerging from their basement. He can't figure out what's going on in any of the obvious ways and, overcome, breaks into their house late at night to discover what it is. He finds a fridge full of "lemonade," curiously labeled with people's names. He chugs a vial, just in time for Anita to catch him. She freaks out, but instead of screaming at him, which he expects, she begins ordering him to breathe deeply, to visualize what he most wants, to coach him through a goal-oriented, guided meditation in his fondest ambitions and desires.
He's drinking liquid gold. Ta-da! It's alchemy. And Sathian's writing is alchemical in the best of ways. She writes Neil with a historians voice, looking back on his youth from a great distance in the future, accounting for how he achieved what we must assume is prestige, not necessarily happiness. The first part of the book gets through Neil, Anita, and Shruti's junior year in high school before jumping ahead to approximately 2015, where Neil is a PhD candidate in History at Berkeley and pretty well accustomed to family black sheep status. Prachi lives across the Bay as an entrepreneur and much of their high achieving gang reunites regularly for brunch, engagement parties, and wedding showers. Everyone except Shruti.
Yet this second half of the novel has much less magic than the first. Which I'll argue is Sathian staying true to Neil's voice. It must necessarily have less magic, because more magic would both harm Neil and make him happy. It's a conundrum he can't solve while he marks time, not submitting pages ahead of his prospectus defense, not dating anyone, not actually living any kind of life. He stands still as the world he's always known swirls around him, bereft of connection. Until Prachi runs into Anita. And then Neil runs into Anjali. And then, then, then.
As I type, I respect Sathian's voice and choices even more. Yet much of what happens in the second half of the book relies on the reader understanding completely the events of the summer of 2005 in the library. Neil is stationed there for hours a day, under the hawk eye of his debate partner Wendi Zhao, a genuinely fierce young woman who suffers no bullshit and eats fun for breakfast. The only relief to days of research drudge work are meeting an older Indian man, a professor from an Indian university, now retired to the States and living with his children. To that point, the reader thinks the focus is Wendi and the old man is a cipher for Neil's ambivalence about life-- with or without "lemonade." You only really understand, in the last 20 pages, the old man in the library is the heart of Neil's story, and Wendi is so many footnotes on Neil's quest to discover that "America" is a dream without borders, a heart state, a fantasy that is magical and realistic.
I've sold myself on the book by typing all that out, but I'm still hung up on the nihilism of Neil as an adult. We are half-told, half-shown that Neil has a sort of belligerent contentedness with being the old home gang's underachiever. He only went to Georgia. He's only doing a Phd at Berkley. He's not even writing a book. I was tempted to read it all of it as Neil being utterly American again-- because he's an Americanist!-- and living it all as a big fuck you to the Indian Overachiever Identity Complex. But no. He gets caught in eddies of mental darkness, fueled by cocaine and adderall binges, and continually resolves to life a half life bereft of joy because that's just his lot in life, because he didn't know what he was doing when he tried his own hand at alchemy. It's just tough to read. You want more for him.
The book doesn't so much have a structured rising action-climax-denouement structure so much as it has a damp squib of a redirect, followed by exposition of the by-now forgotten prequel. And hey! It's the old man from the library. Four stars because when it's good, it's gold. But... 10k?
Gold Diggers trades on its ability to get your head into a 2005 teens listening to Kanye and feeling the first flush of individuation space. Our narrator is Neil Narayan, a sophomore in High School. His older sister is Prachi. His best friends are an assortment of dudes, mostly South Asian. He's in love with Anita, his neighbor, also 15, and for the time being, in school with him. Shruti Patel is in love with him, probably, and all these kids are dealing with the normal pressures of their age-- school, first love, substance, sex, possible career, etc., while also dealing with their Indian Immigrant parents, who make no bones about how they risked, feared, suffered, and so forth, for an opportunity for their children to live in America and have the best possible lives-- which means straight A-Pluses, no exceptions, plus a coordinated, curated set of activities, extra-curriculars, and volunteer activities designed to get them into the Ivy League and from there, more Ivy League, and from there, to extensive wealth, marriage (possibly arranged), procreation, and the dreamiest possible American Dream. All without losing their Indian identities. Or having much of any input about what the study is of or the career is about. To say nothing of the spectre of arranged marriage. If it weren't so actual and documented, you'd think that was the magical realism.
Neil's crush and love for Anita is the kind that always has been and probably always will be-- formed before memory because they have always been neighbors and playmates. They have always had a life together, but high school has begun to pull them apart. Neil can't bring himself to give a shit about math and science. His heart is in his History and English classes. And those don't come with prestige or make money, so his parents tell him to quit with the nonsense and focus on his older sister, in the throes of both pageant season (she's hoping to become Miss India America Georgia) and waiting on her acceptance to Duke, which she is convinced has gone to a rival from another local high school. Neil is an afterthought-- to his parents, sister, friend group, debate team, and then finally to Anita. The person he can relate to is Anita's mother Anjali, and he doesn't know why. Sathian writes their relationship like the edge of a crush, but as the story progresses, she illuminates the connection between the two people who are ignored children of whom much is expected and little is given.
Neil is going about his melancholy life, taking in orders, directions, peer pressure, "nonsense," drama, and lust when he stumbles into Anjali and Anita's house to see them scrambling to redirect him, having caught them with a strangely glittering liquid, emerging from their basement. He can't figure out what's going on in any of the obvious ways and, overcome, breaks into their house late at night to discover what it is. He finds a fridge full of "lemonade," curiously labeled with people's names. He chugs a vial, just in time for Anita to catch him. She freaks out, but instead of screaming at him, which he expects, she begins ordering him to breathe deeply, to visualize what he most wants, to coach him through a goal-oriented, guided meditation in his fondest ambitions and desires.
He's drinking liquid gold. Ta-da! It's alchemy. And Sathian's writing is alchemical in the best of ways. She writes Neil with a historians voice, looking back on his youth from a great distance in the future, accounting for how he achieved what we must assume is prestige, not necessarily happiness. The first part of the book gets through Neil, Anita, and Shruti's junior year in high school before jumping ahead to approximately 2015, where Neil is a PhD candidate in History at Berkeley and pretty well accustomed to family black sheep status. Prachi lives across the Bay as an entrepreneur and much of their high achieving gang reunites regularly for brunch, engagement parties, and wedding showers. Everyone except Shruti.
Yet this second half of the novel has much less magic than the first. Which I'll argue is Sathian staying true to Neil's voice. It must necessarily have less magic, because more magic would both harm Neil and make him happy. It's a conundrum he can't solve while he marks time, not submitting pages ahead of his prospectus defense, not dating anyone, not actually living any kind of life. He stands still as the world he's always known swirls around him, bereft of connection. Until Prachi runs into Anita. And then Neil runs into Anjali. And then, then, then.
As I type, I respect Sathian's voice and choices even more. Yet much of what happens in the second half of the book relies on the reader understanding completely the events of the summer of 2005 in the library. Neil is stationed there for hours a day, under the hawk eye of his debate partner Wendi Zhao, a genuinely fierce young woman who suffers no bullshit and eats fun for breakfast. The only relief to days of research drudge work are meeting an older Indian man, a professor from an Indian university, now retired to the States and living with his children. To that point, the reader thinks the focus is Wendi and the old man is a cipher for Neil's ambivalence about life-- with or without "lemonade." You only really understand, in the last 20 pages, the old man in the library is the heart of Neil's story, and Wendi is so many footnotes on Neil's quest to discover that "America" is a dream without borders, a heart state, a fantasy that is magical and realistic.
I've sold myself on the book by typing all that out, but I'm still hung up on the nihilism of Neil as an adult. We are half-told, half-shown that Neil has a sort of belligerent contentedness with being the old home gang's underachiever. He only went to Georgia. He's only doing a Phd at Berkley. He's not even writing a book. I was tempted to read it all of it as Neil being utterly American again-- because he's an Americanist!-- and living it all as a big fuck you to the Indian Overachiever Identity Complex. But no. He gets caught in eddies of mental darkness, fueled by cocaine and adderall binges, and continually resolves to life a half life bereft of joy because that's just his lot in life, because he didn't know what he was doing when he tried his own hand at alchemy. It's just tough to read. You want more for him.
The book doesn't so much have a structured rising action-climax-denouement structure so much as it has a damp squib of a redirect, followed by exposition of the by-now forgotten prequel. And hey! It's the old man from the library. Four stars because when it's good, it's gold. But... 10k?