A Passage to Nowhere
LEVY, FRANCIS
A Passage to Nowhere Travelers By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Harper & Row. 247 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Francis Levy The comparison with A Passage to India is inevitable. Here is Raymond, like Fielding...
...At one point, Gopi makes a pass at Lee...
...The abandonment of hope, Mrs...
...Movement for its own sake, she has come to understand, will not provide her with the meaning she has sought...
...They act only to conquer boredom and restlessness...
...And what is also unbearable is to think that it has gone and there is nothing like it anymore...
...Sometimes, they simply stomp their feet and scream, as Asha does one evening at a party...
...Instead, everyone floats from place to place, searching for inner peace through frantic sexuality or total abstinence or Christianity or the fervid recitation of Hindu mantras...
...Although the thought of the buses and trains, the shifting landscapes and new adventures, remains tempting, something inside of her has changed, and "now if some place they passed looked attractive—or she heard of some interesting monument, or some fellow passenger invited her to stay—she wouldn't be able to get off the way she used to...
...Assiz...
...The individuals of A Passage to India stepped gingerly towards each other, testing the relation between language and race...
...Travelers is composed of numerous short sequences—monologues by Lee, Raymond's letters to his mother, descriptions of Asha and Gopi—that turn the experiences of life into little more than a series of impressionistic dots...
...Yet every effort fails...
...The form of the novel reflects the characters' emptiness...
...Here, too, are Miss Charlotte, a genial mixture of Christianity and benevolence that harkens back to Forster's Mrs...
...Lee, the well-traveled 20-year-old American girl at the center of the novel, is plagued by the inescapable sameness of everything she encounters, each new place she visits...
...Indeed, she pursues that concern in an almost clinical manner...
...Fundamentally, though, the two books are not alike...
...Moore, and Gopi, contemptuous yet awed, an insistent reminder of Dr...
...Occasionally, the book reads like a controlled experiment, in which the author, by clearing away any possible limitation on her characters' lives (the kind that comes from poverty or imminent danger), allows them to examine the consequences of their freedom, to investigate the nature of their daily existence...
...She doesn't want him, but she goes to bed with him anyway, because she thinks it silly to hurt his feelings...
...Likewise, Asha, a beautiful and wealthy Indian woman, tormented by memories, stares helplessly at the sea from her high-rise apartment: "Even to think of [the past] is unbearable...
...Even the dramatic situations in Ruth Jhab-vala's fine novel are familiar—the deceptions, the misunderstandings, the bad decisions that are made when people attempt to live by theories and abstractions—and all of these cause her characters to flail about exactly as Forster's did...
...For, in the last analysis, the only force that could overcome the obstacles to friendship and love between Englishman and Asian was the power of the Word...
...Mrs...
...At the end of the book, Lee discovers that she can no longer travel from town to town...
...The dissonant quality of this and other relationships in Travelers reveals that nobody genuinely knows what he or she is looking for...
...Jhab-vala's "travelers," on the other hand, communicate not out of any positive desire, but merely from their need for escape...
...Here is Raymond, like Fielding in the E. M. Forster novel, asserting in far-off India some ideal of friendship and humanity learned at Cambridge...
...Nonetheless, unlike Asha and Gopi who, in effect, are still traveling, Lee has found a kind of solace: By giving up her illusions, she has succeeded in coming closer to what she really is and where she has always been...
...From this perspective, Travelers is not a novel about India at all—it could have been set anywhere...
...What is the conclusion of this perpetual testing...
...Jhabvala is obviously less concerned with the significance of human existence in toto than with the quality of endurance...
...Jhabvala suggests, is the beginning of insight...
Vol. 57 • February 1974 • No. 4
