Review of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

Desai's first novel in decades is a 688-page tale that meanders through India, New York, family and romantic relationships, and career false starts, with missteps, mysterious, powerful magical realism elements, and an undercurrent of darkness and despair. The messy resolutions felt appropriately hard-fought after the characters' extended struggles.

Sonia is living away from her Indian family while she studies writing in Vermont, and after growing up used to having multiple family members around, feeding and speaking to her constantly, Sonia is still adjusting to the quiet of college, only having one housemate, and the cold and snow.

Sunny is a journalist in New York City, eager to escape his overbearing family home in India.

Sonia falls into a destructive relationship with a volatile older artist, while Sunny is living with an American woman and struggling to reconcile their differences. Sunny and Sonia are both ambitious but are struggling to envision their career paths.

Sunny and Sonia were briefly the subjects of a matchmaking effort by their families. And now their destinies seem to be circling each other, although Desai doesn't assure the reader that any satisfying resolution will occur around this--or, really, anything else--by the finish of the novel.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this hefty book, and it's not a straightforward novel. Desai offers an ambitiously meandering tale in which many issues stretch out, increasingly twisted and unresolved, for much (sometimes all) of the book, often with little sense of progress for our characters.

Desai weaves darkness, powerful superstition, and magical realism through a wide-ranging story about family, tradition, fear, missteps, danger, and obtuse elements whose significance only in the end become clear(er) to our main protagonists. The situations around relationships and life choices are often messy, complex, mystifying, and frustrating. Current-day conflicts link to generational trauma, storytelling, and mysterious power.

Eventually The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny offers hard-won, somewhat settled existences for its main players, who have each come into their own via zigzagging, imperfect paths, and Desai allows formerly unthinkable bonds to form in and among them. When characters' mettle and their desires became clear to themselves in key moments, I celebrated all the more for having stuttered along with them as they struggled, worried, denied, and suffered for much of the novel.

In the end, loyalty, resolve, and belief in the power of darkness and the inexplicable clear the way for connection, creativity, and love.

Kiran Desai is also the author of The Inheritance of Loss.

I listened to the 688-page The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny as a 25.5-hour audiobook.

Kiran Desai is also the author of The Inheritance of Loss.

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