In Search of a Slippery Soul

...It is his fate to be without a destiny...

...This traditional narrative approach seems odd initially, and at times the formality of the voice is jarring: "The ship will carry Jonathan Bridgeman into the mouth of the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal and ease him into the Mediterranean, so-called because it is the center of the world and around its shores civilization was born...

...She is Amrita, the wealthy, opium-addicted teenager whom the Indian party is escorting to her future husband...

...The hero's plan to expunge his past and live out the lie of the purebred Jonathan Bridgeman needs to meet with defeat...

...He has become so expert at inhabiting others that he can no longer access his underlying self...

...Forrester is temporarily pulled to shelter by a mud-covered woman whose clothes have been ripped free by the wind and rain...

...A vengeful maid soon reveals the true source of his pale complexion, however, and he is immediately cast from the house—not merely because he is a bastard, but because in colonial India his British paternity is an irredeemable flaw, if not a curse...

...There is no unreliable narrator, no blending of genres or switching of viewpoint...

...Kunzru intentionally thwarts this...

...Reviewed by Evan Hughes "Write about what you know," fledgling authors are endlessly advised, so first novels tend to be barely fictionalized autobiographies...

...Nicknamed Star, she is an identifiable type: the heartbreaker...

...Jonathan's moments of self-revelation are few and far between—"better, he thinks, to lead an unexamined life...

...Englishman Ronald Forrester, a government horticulturist, chances upon a party leading camels through a desolate ravine in rural India...

...Nevertheless, as the first scene of The Impressionist portends, its style is far from postmodern...

...You're very sweet, but you're just like everybody else...

...After being taken from the brothel to serve as the captive and protégé of a bizarre British Major, Pran escapes to Bombay and is taken in by the Reverend Andrew MacFarlane, a Scottish missionary, and his wife, Elspeth...

...The real Bridgeman has conveniently been slain without a trace...

...When a flash flood comes, "All the world is in the past...

...The work could fit under many headings, but it is essentially an identity quest...

...While attending Oxford University courtesy of Jonathan Bridgeman's inheritance, the protagonist falls in love with a professor's daughter, Astarte Chapel, who seems to him "the very essence of the English girl...

...When the foreseeablerejection comes, he is devastated...

...The book's last section, when Jonathan joins Professor Chapel on an anthropological expedition to West Africa, is its weakest...

...Much of what propels us forward is the desire to uncover who the shape-shifter really is...

...The opening chapter, relating the one brief yet momentous meeting of Pran's parents, is almost Biblical in style and substance...

...The John Irvingesque confluence of circumstances that allows Pran to smoothly replace him strains credulity, yet as in Irving, the reader is inclined to go along...

...It is therefore all the more unsatisfying to find out that the mysterious package we have been dying to open is in fact empty: "Just at the moment when one person falls away and the next has yet to take possession, the impressionist is completely blank...

...One of the few constants amid Pran's various roles is his growing talent for mimicry...

...The hero's failure to locate a core persona is part of the point of this philosophical novel, of course, but it also will frustrate some readers...

...It is too reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darhiess—the trip down the winding river, the local leader come unstrung, the threat of chaos and madness—and feels like a postscript to the real story...

...On the evening in Paris that he plans to propose, he is shaken by the sight of all the racial minorities in the streets...

...He and the travelers both set up camp, then find themselves whipped by a ferocious monsoon...

...Sophisticated but ungovernable, forever chiding Jonathan for his conventionality, she could be the reincarnation of Hemingway's Lady Brett Ashley...

...the novel is an old-fashioned coming-of-age epic, with a single lead character, a love story and a linear plot...

...Although the hero of The Impressionist, Pran Nath Razdan, shares the author's mixed Indian-English parentage, Pran's story encompasses times, places and people that lie well beyond Kunzru's own experience...

...Trying to survive out on the street, the unworldly Pran before long finds himself imprisoned in a brothel, where he is made to dress as a woman and called Rukhsana...

...This troubled couple's battles over faith and colonialism are keenly compelling...

...Neither would it make sense for him to return to the life of a Bombay hustler, or be taken back by his Indian clan...

...If you write over a word often enough, the original will no longer be legible...

...Emotional investment in the protagonist is ultimately limited by his inscrutability...

...In an irony not lost on Jonathan, Star tells him he is too much the proper Englishman: "Gloucestershire, Chopham Hall, Oxford, blah blah blah...

...He has raised himself above this," he thinks...

...Angela Carter, Jorge Luis Borges and Salman Rushdie are merely a few writers who have explored the breakdown of recognized structures and categories...

...His attraction is driven largely by the conviction that winning her will complete his transformation into an upper-class Brit...

...There is nothing there at all...

...Kunzru's principal preoccupations —the fungible nature of personality, the loss of distinction between the real and fake, the blurring of the boundaries of race, gender and class—are among the favorites of contemporary literature...

...Occasionally one encounters an exception, like this debut effort from 32year-old Hari Kunzru...

...Set in the first quarter of the 20th century, the book spans three continents and as many decades, and includes a multitude of richly imagined characters...

...A bold, unfashionably omniscient voice narrates the story as it tackles such subjects as race, class, colonialism, and the roots of personal identity...

...Having earned money as a kind of grifter in clamorous 1920s Bom bay, the newly streetwise Pran undergoes his most radical and important metamorphosis: With the passport of an aristocratic orphan and heir named Jonathan Bridgeman in hand, he boards a steamer bound for England...

...Before Forrester is swept away and drowned, the two fall into a wordless, animalistic embrace, and the hero-to-be is conceived...

...Our disappointment at never knowing what lies beneath the illusions is at least partly compensated by the realization that it must be so...

...The ring in his pocket is about to put the seal on it...

...He is a spoiled, difficult boy, ensconced in the luxurious house of the lawyer who married Amrita and believes Pran is his son...

...The tenor is less exalted in the next section, where we meet Pran, now a 15-yearold, just as he is making a clumsy advance on a family servant girl...

...Kunzru tells a good yarn, and his ideas are thrown into relief by the fluidity of the tale and the lack of distracting formal experimentation...

...To Kunzru's great credit, one still yearns to see the main character unmasked...

...If he were to wed Star and set down roots among the upper crust, we would cry foul...

...Although she is altogether wrong about his background, there is a fundamental accuracy to what she concludes...

...He does lack personality...

...On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine the voyage ending any other way...

...Particularly after he discovers he can pass as white, his mutations are less a necessity than a clever tool...

...Now there is nothing but a torrent of white water rushing down a mountain, and the future is contained in that water, suspended in it like the treetrunks and thick red mud it has swept off the hillside...

...The scion has been prized since birth for his handsomeness and uncommonly light skin, taken to be the mark of his superior Kashmiri blood...

...It is only one of a number of widely divergent identities he will assume in his far-reaching Odyssey...

...We are looking at modern art, but inside a comfortable old farmhouse...

...He becomes defined primarily by his ability to shed one character and don another...

...Frustration is an inherent cost of Kunzru's truth: The soul of the career impressionist is unknowable, even to himself...

...The young man soon entertains thoughts of marriage and adopts Star's anthropologist father as a mentor to improve his odds...

...Their locales are limited, their themes are carefully chosen, and their supporting casts are generally small and thinly drawn— the betterto focus on the inner journey of the protagonist/novelist...

...More often, however, the disjunction of form and content is surprisingly effective...