Nilanjana S Roy: Freudenberger and the fiction moment

SPEAKING VOLUMES

, courtesy an interview that ran in Publisher's Lunch.

He thinks we need more serious reviewing of bestsellers. (Personally, I'd love to see Derrida take on the South Beach Diet books.) He regrets not having read Ayn Rand. (There's always time. Howard Roark isn't going anywhere, Mr Tannenhaus.)

He plans to cut down on the number of full-page reviews "" bye-bye, 1,400 words, hello 700 or bust. (One new-format NYTBR review = two blurbs. Glory hallelujah.) And he has forever changed my perception of my world with this casual aside on the paper's decision to run fewer fiction reviews: "If anything fiction is just generally being slighted, by the publishing industry and by us. We live in a nonfiction moment."

We live in a "nonfiction moment"? If it's been the nonfiction era all along, why didn't someone tell me? I feel Rip Van Winkled "" I've been living in the wrong century, the fiction one, all along.

Goodbye, Midnight's Children; hello, 109th book about Bush and the Iraq war. Farewell, bright new anointed children of the fiction boom "" Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer "" welcome, all you downtrodden authors of management manuals.

The only way I could deal with the news of the end of the world as I knew it was to push off in search of a genuine fiction moment "" fleeting, perhaps, anachronistic, certainly, but soothing to the soul all the same.

It turned out that Nell Freudenberger was reading at a local Barista the very same evening. In 2003, the New Yorker anointed her as a talent to watch. This sort of accolade is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it guarantees fame and publishing contracts. On the other "" well, Salon summed it up when it profiled Nell Freudenberger under the headline: Too Young, Too Pretty, Too Successful.

To everyone who hates the idea that Nell Freudenberger was "discovered" at the age of 26, or who gagged at the thought that she'd made it simultaneously to Vogue, Elle and the Village Voice and the Washington Post Book World, I have three words of advice: read Lucky Girls. Even in our cynical age, good writing makes its own mark.

The Corner Bookshop above the Barista in Defence Colony is packed. Most of the people who've shown up read, sometimes for a living, often not, but always for pleasure.

Some know Freudenberger, who spent half a year in Delhi. She's seen more of South Asia than many of us have; her friends at Harvard remember her as formidably bright and as a lovely person.

No one at this reading will raise the question of Freudenberger's early success; it's not important to this set of readers, for whom the writing is key and is what's drawn them in.

Nell Freudenberger is sitting quietly in a corner, her face almost blank as she waits for people to negotiate their way up a tricky staircase and settle down. She is now, a year after the five stories in Lucky Girls came out to widespread acclaim, a seasoned player in the weird and slightly sadistic 21st century invention known as the "author tour".

She is nervous, she tells us, because Lucky Girls is set in Delhi. She's read it before, but not in Delhi, to an audience of Dilliwallahs. She almost chickened out; she thought about choosing another story "" the one set in Bangkok, perhaps, or the one set in Vietnam.

In another piece, she'd touched on her time in the capital: "In the summer of 2000, in Delhi, I lived with a friend in a one-room prefabricated cottage which belonged to a Bengali woman from a Hindu Calcutta family. She had once been married to a famous Muslim classical musician and taken the title, Begum."

But Freudenberger needn't have worried about reading in Delhi. The few mistakes she's made are minor, forgiveable: a character in another story is called "Nandani", not "Nandini"; "mehendi" is spelled "mendhi"; "Lakshman Rekha" comes out as "Lakshman Reika". But she gets the bigger picture right; she has an unerring eye for the details that really matter.

In Lucky Girls, the lead character visits Lodi Gardens, "where women in salwar-kameez and running shoes promenaded briskly down designated exercise paths". "Great ruined domes, purple in the last bit of light, appeared to float above the wet grass."

She doesn't read from "Outside the Eastern Gate", which has a lovely description of contemporary Delhi.

"As we crept toward India Gate, it seemed that the broad-leaved pipal trees that once hung above the avenues and made a sound like water had been replaced with scrawny, soot-coated yearlings. The avenues themselves seemed to have been pried apart to make room for wedge-shaped concrete islands, painted with cautionary stripes, where the familiar starved cows nosed a new kind of manufactured garbage."

The audience warms to Lucky Girls, which is written from the perspective of a young American woman who remains stubbornly in India after the death of her married Indian lover.

There's something about Nell Freudenberger's talent "" the ability to observe from the outside of a culture while making absolute sense to an "insider" "" that draws you in, and I suspect it would work just as well if she had read from the story set in Bangkok, or the one about the mother who goes to Afghanistan, or the one in Vietnam.

Freudenberger tells us we have a longer attention span than audiences in New York: "After ten minutes, they start creeping towards the doors." No one wants to leave. People ask questions, haltingly; they queue up to have their books signed.

Lucky Girls was what Freudenberger wrote while she was trying to write a novel that never quite came off. She wrote it sitting in New York, remembering Asia from a distance, a full year after she'd read a Jhumpa Lahiri short story aloud to a friend in the summer heat of Delhi.

"I liked working on that story because it wasn't work," Freudenberger writes, "it was simply an hour and fifteen minutes of nostalgia every morning, before I got on the train to go to my real job."

Over the years, I've had my fiction moments in Delhi. Some of them have been unbearably tedious. Some have been moments with a capital M, as when Rushdie showed up for the Commonwealth Awards, to be laminated for future reference.

But there have been very few moments of unadulterated pleasure, where you're returned to the fun of opening a new book by an unknown author and discovering that it has something to tell you that you really want to hear. Let Tannenhaus savour his nonfiction moment. I've had my fiction hour, and it was brilliant.

nilroy@lycos.com