To Whom It May Concern [Hardcover]

The task of defining, even in the broadest terms, the protean postmodern self has bedevilled artists for decades. What does it mean to be an individual in a society uprooted from the certainties of family and ethnic tradition, objective morality, and religious belief? How much of what we call our fixed “self” is merely a collage of competing cultural signs, family dynamics, biology, and personal tastes? Poet, novelist, and academic Priscila Uppal is the latest author to wade into the waters of identity politics with her second novel, To Whom It May Concern, the saga of the splintered Dange family. The aging patriarch, an Indian immigrant named Hardev, is an engineer confined to a wheelchair since an accident left him almost completely paralyzed from the neck down. Long separated from his French-Canadian wife Isobel, Hardev shares the family’s original suburban Ottawa home with his son Emile. As the novel opens, Hardev is watching his fully acculturated adult children listlessly go through the motions of a Thanksgiving dinner. Present at the table are Emile and Birenda, Hardev’s oldest daughter, and her rich fiancé Victor, who is meeting Hardev for the first time. Isobel has skipped the dinner, as has Dorothy, the couple’s 17-year-old daughter, a precocious deaf student and artist who works part-time in a tattoo parlour. Hardev is anxious about more than just his weakening health and his failure to deliver on the ideal of family life that he’d promised himself as a young man starting a new life in Canada. Unknown to his family, he is about to lose his home to the bank unless he can find a way to earn enough money to pay off his back mortgage payments. The novel is filled out with a number of secondary characters, including Mohab, Emile’s devout Muslim friend, who may or may not be a closeted homosexual; Hardev’s homecare worker Rodriguez; and Kite, Dorothy’s co-conspirator in a plan to build a massive collage (eventually titled “To Whom It May Concern”) charting their fellow students’ transient, fluctuating identities. That this list of characters reads a little like the ideal roll call for a banquet celebrating contemporary Canada’s rich mix of polyglot identities is most likely intentional. Uppal, like Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru, and Jonathan Lethem, is striving to make a Big Statement about how culture and ideologies both construct and deconstruct self, and how any deviations from cultural studies graduate seminar ideals will not be tolerated. This ideological orthodoxy contributes to both the novel’s strengths and weaknesses. Uppal achieves some fine comic effects in her interlocking narratives and identity conflicts. This is especially true when she takes the characters out of their comfort zones, as when Emile begins to suspect that he may have non-platonic feelings for Mohab. Hardev, springing from an older, less self-conscious generation, is the novel’s finest creation, a sympathetically pompous father fighting the breakdown of his body and the encroachment of a hideous subdivision.     If Uppal had narrated the novel exclusively from Hardev’s point of view, she might have humanized what eventually becomes a predictable comedy of manners, but she squanders intimacy and narrative motion by continually shifting the perspective from one character to another. And for all the novel’s 21st-century knowingness, the narrative voice would not be out of place in a Victorian novel of the duller sort. Flitting between generations and cultures and personal emergencies, Uppal writes in the same formal, reflective, distancing voice. Here is Hardev’s point of view: “He never imagined his daughter would ask a young man to marry her, without her father’s permission…. Yet here is this man, this Victor, whom he’s met for the first time – the first time! – today.” Here is Hardev’s alienated 17-year-old daughter: “Dorothy doesn’t feel she belongs to such a family, nor does she understand how she is supposed to benefit from the family connection.” His graduate-student son: “Though he doesn’t mind standing in the cold now and then, he does hope to find a PhD program where he is more permanently welcome….” And finally, the marriage-obsessed eldest daughter: “Without being able to pinpoint why, she knows that most people are uncomfortable with chosen childlessness, as if it represents a rejection of the future, a rejection of hope.” The controlling authorial voice and overly schematic structure work on one level as a playful deconstruction of the traditional novel’s attempt to contain the ultimately uncontainable human self. But that’s little consolation for the reader struggling through yet another predictable confrontation between characters representing the usual shades of grey. People – even people in novels – are never predictable, as Uppal ought to know.

“To be this young and assured a storyteller, this insightful an observer of human nature is, if not the product of divine intervention, at least very rare.” — Ottawa Citizen

Hardev Dange is suffering through a tumultuous year. He’s just been informed that the bank is going to foreclose on his house. His fickle daughter Birendra is on the verge of marriage, his son Emile is studying curses (while falling in love with a fellow male grad student), and his younger daughter, Dorothy, who’s deaf, is working at a tattoo and body piercing parlour and collecting stories from the older men languishing at her local hangout. And because he’s confined to a wheelchair, Hardev is dependent on his homecare worker, the kleptomaniac Rodriguez, to help him devise a plan to keep house and home together.

In this modern, multicultural re-telling of King Lear, Uppal explores the vulnerability and complexity of family and inheritance. She exposes the tragic and comedic dimensions of our failures to communicate and the consequences of our betrayals, which result in disappointment and disillusionment, but also, unexpectedly, in moments of compassion and love.

Priscila Uppal was one of three Canadian writers on the 2007 shortlist for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the author of five collections of poetry and the internationally acclaimed novel The Divine Economy of Salvation. Uppal completed her Ph.D in English Literature at York University in Toronto, where she is a professor of English Literature. She was named a “Canadian Writer to Watch” by the American Library Association.

Thanksgiving

My kids have the manners of savages, he thinks, as his son lifts a slice of pepperoni pizza from the box to his open mouth, grasping the cheese with loose fingers, forcing separation from its neighbour. It’s Monday October 13, 2003, Thanksgiving, and Hardev Dange hasn’t enjoyed a traditional turkey dinner since his wife, Isobel, left. That first year, 1988, he tried preparing the meal himself – or, to be more exact, monitoring the meal once the homecare worker left. Manoeuvring around the stove was difficult, the door troublesome to control with only one good hand, and the pots of potatoes and carrots were nearly impossible to stir from his wheelchair. The bird burned. Meat dry, skin tough – the children didn’t hide their distaste; the girl, twelve at the time, called it “disgusting” as she removed it from the oven, ribcage split, stuffing black. Hardev had forgotten the gravy. The mashed potatoes dripped. The only thing not spoiled was the canned cranberry sauce from Dominion’s. Since then he’d given up on traditional trimmings for family gatherings – since then the Dominion’s had become a Loblaws, then a No Frills – and opted to let the children choose takeout instead. Pizza won every time. A good choice, he admits. There’s a pizza place on every block in the city, and it can be delivered every single day of the year, right to your home.

But Hardev still yearns for his family to be like other families on Ashbrook Crescent; now more than ever, with Mr. Karkiev signing notices in the back of his mind. He wishes they were settling into an afternoon of Thanksgiving Monday football (though he doesn’t follow football, only hockey, as any good Canadian should), or card games around the dining-room table after the dishes are washed (though they have a dishwasher, and no one’s played cards in the house since childhood Go Fish days). He doesn’t want his girls, or even the boy, to mind the time, worrying whether they should scoot off to their mother’s place to wish her a happy holiday too. Hardev Dange wants a white linen tablecloth (preferably handed down through the generations), pewter or brass candleholders, a horn filled with corn and gourds, and pumpkin pie. Yes, pumpkin pie, that glorious solid yet mushy mixture he tasted with delight shortly after immigrating from India. To add insult to injury, this year Isobel has insisted on keeping Dorothy because of the flu. “Dorothy wants to come, but she has the flu.” That’s what Isobel said. How can Hardev argue, when he has kept them all in the dark about the impending changes to his living arrangements, the legal papers, the telephone calls, and when it’s common sense and general practice that he should be exposed to as little sickness as possible, even when it’s his year to host Thanksgiving?

None of them bothers with utensils. Earlier, when the girl’s new boyfriend, Victor, opened the cutlery drawer in the kitchen and began counting the nickel-plated knives and forks, she stopped him. “We use plastic. The less hassle the better.” Tearing open a package of paper plates from the supply in the bottom cupboards under the microwave, she gleefully presented them as “The Family China.”

At least Victor is dressed well, Hardev notes, and is wearing a pleasant sea-breeze cologne. No tie, but decent navy blue dress slacks and a creaseless beige Polo shirt. Tidy brownish-blond hair cut close to the scalp, clear coconut-white skin except for a few tiny pimples on his forehead, a thin nose, eyes slightly squinty and blue, he reminds Hardev of his old classmates at the London School of Economics.

The girl, Birendra, tries to catch a straying slice of pepperoni before it hits her maroon blouse. Too late. Rolling her eyes, she dabs at the sauce, smushing it into the clown-face napkin on her chest. “Was there a sale on?” she asks Hardev, nudging Victor and extracting another napkin from the small pile. “Did your homecare worker pick these out? The one who wears women’s clothes?”

“I bought them for Dorothy. Dorothy likes clowns. And Ludwig, that’s his name. He was fired four years ago, after he stole your mother’s old skirts and high heels – the ones from her university days she left behind because they didn’t fit – from the basement. I reported it when they went missing. You know that.” Bending over the cherrywood dining-room table he purchased from the Bay the year they moved into the house, a six-seater with a leaf that can add two more – although not comfortably, in this room lined with cabinets full of unused china and cassette tapes, boxes and boxes of newspapers, and a broken electric wheelchair that sits like a shamed sentinel in the corner – Hardev sips ginger ale from a bendable straw and tries to concentrate on the dinner, on his children around him, to keep his mind free of other thoughts. He doesn’t want to be annoyed with the girl, but he is. And the boy, already on his third slice, will probably end the evening with a stomach ache.

“Dorothy’s seventeen, Dad.”

“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t like clowns anymore.” He tries to catch his son’s eye, send a signal to back him up, as family should, but Emile continues to munch on crust while Hardev stares futilely at his bushy black eyebrows – a Dange trait they all have in common, except Dorothy. “I thought for sure he’d stop fiddling around with magic books and hocus-pocus once he grew up. But look, that’s what he studies at university. At a recognized university my boy studies superstitions and curses!”

Securing a fourth slice, Emile hands another to Victor. The two large pizzas are vanishing quickly, even though Hardev does not join in. Pizza isn’t part of his diet, though he might be able to get away with a slice as a treat. Such things are permitted. But he sticks to his daily regimen of frozen Green Giant mixed vegetables, thawed in the microwave, and a single drumstick of Shake’n Bake original or barbecue chicken, cooked in bulk at the start of each month by Rodriguez, his main homecare worker for the last two years, and stored in dozens of plastic microwavable trays. A glass of ginger ale and a coffee pot of watered-down cranberry juice to aid digestion complete his meals. No dessert. Ever. The sugar balloons his stomach into a giant mixing bowl, and since he can’t exercise, he always gains weight when he eats sweets – unlike his children, who are all, as he was before the accident, uniformly thin.

“Let’s not argue,” Birendra sighs, raising her deep brown eyes from her plate and correcting her hunched posture. “Today is a special day.”

Yes, it is, Hardev agrees. Holidays are family days, special days, days the house is once again filled with his children. But he can see that the girl has slipped her hand underneath the table to grasp her boyfriend’s. She always brings a boyfriend to each occasion. Even if they’ve only been dating a few weeks, she never arrives alone. With her mahogany skin, long black lashes, sleek legs, lean face (though she has always hated the tiny bump at the bridge of her nose), and very small breasts, she is assuredly pretty and has attracted all kinds of boys over the years, most of them white and preppy, donning each like a new bracelet or necklace, something to show off at the beginning of dinner, something easily forgotten. Victor, who has been admiring her hand in his, meets Hardev’s gaze and, smiling awkwardly, lets go. Hardev does not want to upset the girl. It saddens him how often their short time together as a family is spent in uneasiness or outright discomfort, and now, more than ever, he wishes everyone would get along.

Though the dining room might be considered to be in disarray, in need of dusting, wiping, and proper sorting, with stacks of Ottawa Citizens along the wall, a broken record player and finicky sewing machine awaiting a new pedal, the table without a proper cloth, plates, or cutlery laid out, it is all still theirs, and he wishes he could stop time so they could all take a moment, as other families do for grace, to appreciate the house: the frayed but resilient light brown carpet, the chipped but bright white paint on the walls and ceiling, the sturdy nails that for fifteen years have held up school photographs of Emile and Birendra and the baby photograph of Dorothy taken hours after her birth, even the maudlin red-tinted glass chandelier with the dangling red beads, its cobwebbed red bulbs like jilted hearts. All this moves Hardev; it’s not perfect, not expensive, their dining room, but it’s theirs: loyal, reliable, worthy of some attention, like family. Or like family should be.

“Thank you for inviting me, Mr. Dange,” Victor says, closing the lid of the second pizza box and rolling his sleeves back down.

“I didn’t invite you. But you’re welcome. My daughter’s friends come and go. Come and go. My son’s never come here. Call me Harry, like everyone else.”

“They have their own families to visit,” Emile mumbles absently, wiping a slice of green olive off his chin.

“Victor will be sticking around,” Birendra states firmly, her straight black hair adding severity to her face. Smiling with the same awkwardness as when he released her hand, Victor now produces a bottle of white wine from the green shoulder bag tucked underneath her chair, then gestures silently at the open package of Styrofoam cups to Emile’s left. Without hesitation, Birendra nods.

“It’s nice wine,” she offers, as Victor lines up four of the cups and uncorks the bottle with an opener also procured from her bag, “if a little on the warm side by now.” Hardev stares at ...