Book review: The Laughter by Sonora Jha
That savage chortle
Sonora Jha`s book has a definitive personality; it is someone standing in the shadows of an ancient arch looking out at a decidedly un-ancient campus square with a sardonic half-smile on their lips and savage murder in their heart.
On the surface of it, The Laughter is about Oliver Harding, an old-school academic, a world-weary and cynical Chesterton scholar with a pronounced if hitherto subtle eye for women, both of the faculty and the student kind. At the start of the story, we watch him develop some decidedly prurient feelings for Ruhaba Khan, a Pakistani professor, his junior colleague at a Seattle college. She is polite but aloof in the beginning; then her visiting nephew Adil Alam is thrown into this particularly strange mix, and she begins to turn more friendly to our protagonist. Just friendly, mind you.
Adil starts to look upon the older man as a friend and well-wisher, starts to go out trekking with Harding, walks the latter`s dog Edgar regularly, and in time, begins to confide in him, to open the box of tumultuous emotions that is the inevitable baggage carried by most youngsters of Adil`s age, for the academic to look at, examine and sadly, judge.
Harding, of course, is cultivating Adil`s company for just one very obvious reason: to get closer to Adil`s aunt, the object of the ageing academic`s fantasies.
It doesn’t take the discerning reader too long to see through Oliver Harding`s supercilious and seemingly liberal veneer, and recognise the feelings of superiority, disdain for people not like him, contempt for terms which he feels are trending in ephemeral fashion on college campuses across the US, terms like diversity, sexual identity, cultural misappropriation. Is Dr Harding a closet racist…well, Jha keeps the jury out on that for quite a while, even as the reader makes up their mind soon enough.
A cataclysmic conclusion
By the time things move to a cataclysmic conclusion – be warned, it’s a slow burn of a denouement — something the reader sees coming, the same reader is totally disillusioned by a whole bunch of things and people on and off the campus in this story.
Jha employs a forceful, satirical style, with its savage leitmotif subtly in sight but not so overpowering as to overtake matters. The story is a direct, unflinching look at campus matters in an US university, matters that most non-Americans, and possibly some Americans too, would flinch from.
Everything is put under the unforgiving microscope: politics of race, identity, colour, religion, diversity, othering, terrorism, problematic stances, Capitol Hill politics (the story is set around the time Trump wins the US presidency), the politics of the hijab, woke politics..…you name it and it`s there, poking an offended head from out of the crowd gathered in the less- than- hallowed halls of academia. Jha calls it as it is, refusing to pass judgement on any of it, leaving the reader to absorb it all, take a deep breath and then take a call. Or, as I suspect might well be the case with many an Indian reader, pass on taking a call, even while heaving a sigh of relief that things haven`t quite reached this stage in our varsities!
There is a wry vein of humour loosely threading itself through the tale but overall, irony looms large over this story. There is decided irony when the author has Harding look at a Black girl and take note of her `unique` name: `Conscience or Essence or something;` when she has Harding describe himself as a man of pallor; when she has him tell us about the `shamers` and how they make up new nouns as they go along. There is irony in Harding`s arrogant yet naïve dismissal of the protesting students across America: they were wailing for a critical focus on the evolution of systems of oppression such as racism, capitalism, colonialism, etc, across America, he states, castigating them as young people who want to take down all that is good and wise and learned, who want to topple statues. There is irony tinged with sadness, when the reader hears Harding tell investigators that the Muslim porn he occasionally watches is very different from the stuff other Americans watch.
But let`s move away from Oliver Harding. There`s much irony in an encounter Ruhaba has with a little girl at a Whole Foods outlet, juxtaposing the latter`s surprise at setting eyes on `a Muslim,` with Ruhaba`s practiced way of defusing the situation. There`s much irony when Jha has Ruhaba say, I know no other culture in the world that can see every colour but gray.
There is also a strong touch of irony in the title; this is not a joyful or exuberant kind of laughter, it carries a manic tinge to it. Let`s face it, this is sheer untrammeled angry laughter.
The Laughter by Sonora Jha. PenguinRandomHouse Books. 302 pages. Rs 599.
This ran in the New Sunday Express Magazine of 16 July 2023.
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Sheila Kumar • July 16, 2023