Well-Behaved Indian Women

May 25, 2020
Dave’s ambitious but uneven debut follows three generations of Indian and Indian-American women as they navigate life. In 2018, Simran Mehta, 26, is engaged to her high school sweetheart, and their lives seem fast-tracked to success; he’s in medical school at NYU, she’s in grad school at Columbia for psychology, and they couldn’t be happier. After a chance encounter with a handsome newspaper columnist Simran admires, unwanted emotions surge, not least her latent ambition to become a journalist. As Simran tracks an increasingly rocky road to self-discovery, she finds little comfort from her mother, Nandini, who is wrestling with a professional crisis of her own after years of taking a back seat to her husband’s career. Simran’s visit with her grandmother in India leads her to learn that Nandini, too, had struggled with the social pressures of her community, which gives Simran the courage to buck expectations. The stilted writing style—particularly the exposition-laden, unnatural dialogue—and near complete lack of sexual or romantic tension in the love story are big hurdles, as is a plot that too often feels like it’s stuck in neutral. Other novels have more effectively—and enjoyably—addressed the tensions between immigrant mothers and daughters.