Western Lane by Chetna Maroo: A profoundly resonant debut

“You can think it out, but in the end you don’t know what is going to happen until you go through it…” In this profoundly resonant debut novel, 11-year-old Gopi and her two sisters are put through a gruelling training regime in their local squash court, by a father searching for a way to parent in the wake of their mother’s death.

Gopi’s obsession with squash gives the book its structure and philosophy, as the family navigate their grief, reconstitute themselves in the time after. It is a remarkable book in how it deals with that time, drifting forwards, backwards, sometimes superimposing different moments upon each other. To that end, it also contains some of the best sportswriting I’ve read since Eimear Ryan’s Holding Her Breath.

It is a vivid period in Gopi’s and her sisters’ lives. They have no idea what will happen to them, or how the family will reassert itself, and they deal with this in different ways. Rather than being a book full of twists and turns, Western Lane holds its gaze unflinchingly on people who are figuring out how to continue living together. In a strange way, those scenes evoked for me the long takes of David Lynch’s 2017 iteration of Twin Peaks.

In the act of making books, writers make choices on every line, with every word. This is a debut in which Chetna Maroo gets every choice right, even the riskier ones. It reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut (A Pale View of Hills) in that sense, and it has the same quality of being so calm, so confident, so close to the profound and yet rooted in real experience. Think also Marilynne Robinson, and Ocean Vuong (at his very best). The writing is beautiful and wise; the feeling both hauntological and deeply human. In fact, as a debut it feels anachronistic in contemporary publishing in how unshowy the voice is: never shouting or baying or claiming; simply speaking, relating a transcendent time in a quartet of lives.

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As children, we were probably first drawn to the magic in reading: the feeling that anything is possible in a story. In this novel, where squash courts grow and pulse, where people can be summoned from other places entirely, where future, present and past can happen simultaneously, this sense of magic delighted me, and will stay with me.