‘The Association of Small Bombs,’ by Karan Mahajan (original) (raw)
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Karan MahajanCredit...Molly Winters
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- March 15, 2016
THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS
By Karan Mahajan
276 pp. Viking. $26.
Allow me to skip the prelude to judgment that usually begins a book review, and just get right to it: Karan Mahajan’s second novel, “The Association of Small Bombs,” is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. If you enjoy novels that happily disrupt traditional narratives — about grief, death, violence, politics — I suggest you go out and buy this one. Post haste.
That done, let’s get to the why of this novel’s excellence, which starts with its brio. After the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, several articles were published about the equally horrifying attacks in Beirut and why few in the West had seemed to care or even to notice. In Beirut, 43 civilians were killed and over 200 injured by ISIS suicide bombers, but the carnage barely registered with the Western press, governments or thousands of people posting on Facebook. Why? Probably because violence in the Middle East and South Asia seems de rigueur for us, the same way mass shootings in the United States are being met with less outrage — and more apathy — every day.
Another thing most of us don’t care about? The inner lives of the people who commit terrorism, though this seems less problematic. We don’t want to know about a suicide bomber’s diabetic parents and belittling ex-girlfriend. We don’t want to know about his dreams — his fear and hurt and longing — because he killed our families and friends. He is a mass murderer, and that’s that. But as part of its mission to agitate these patterns of thought, “The Association of Small Bombs” (a) forces us to care about just another terrorist attack in a market in Delhi and (b) insists that we consider — and possibly even like — the people for whom terrorism exerts its appeal.
This is, needless to say, a gutsy move, especially since the novel begins not with a terrorist but with Deepa and Vikas Khurana, whose boys — 11 and 13 years old — are killed in a market while fetching their father’s TV from an electrician. Such a stupid reason to die, which is the point: Tragedies are senseless and random unless you are their perpetrator. So the boys die, but their friend Mansoor survives with injuries to his wrist and arm, which thrusts at least some of the novel’s narrative structure into view: It will follow the Khuranas and Mansoor as they slog through the welter of their feelings after the blast.
Permutations of grief dominate a good part of the sections devoted to the Khuranas. We watch them grope for each other; repel each other; fight, make love and then decamp from whatever solaces each has to afford the other. Theirs are the most thrilling, tender and tragic parts of the novel, which are also periodically funny. It’s hard to know what to make of the novel’s flirtation with drollery, since it really is just a flirtation; no one would call this a tragicomic narrative. In some way, these moments of levity feel almost grossly misplaced, which has the strange effect of also making them feel just right. Drollery is exceedingly difficult to quote out of context, so you’ll have to trust me that when Deepa — the boys’ mother — thinks about her future with her husband but is “in denial too, convinced they would kill themselves,” it’s almost a laugh-out-loud moment. Or that when Mansoor’s mother, Afsheen, thinks about his future, becoming “sentimental and hysterical,” one gets the feeling the narrator is gently and lovingly mocking her for her outsize passion.
Notably, such moments are confined to the novel’s first 100 pages or so, as if to perch us atop its slide toward fatalism. As the narrative suggests, nothing recovers from a bomb — not our humanity, our politics or even our faith. Not entirely, in any case, which is best borne out by Mansoor, whose injuries appear relatively cosmetic but come to traumatize his life for the next six years in the form of debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome. He wants to be a computer programmer; you can imagine how good his chances are.
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