Western Lane - Chetna Maroo
- Publisher – Picador
- Published – Out now
- Price – £9.99 paperback | £5.99 Kindle
I read Western Lane in a very focused 90 minutes on the train from Chester to Manchester, and I've been trying to figure out how to write about it ever since. I'll start with the blurb, and then I'll do my best to find some words about it:
Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo.
But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.
An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is both a valentine and an elegy for innocence—for the closeness of sisterhood, for the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other, for the force of obsession and its consequences.
I think if I had to choose one word to describe Western Lane it would be "tender". There's a softness and a gentleness to the prose and to the way each character is shown to us that's really lovely to read. Even in the "action" (for lack of a better term) scenes where Gopi plays squash - a game I know very little about - the focus is more on the internality of that, on what it feels to be in that flow state where everything slows down and becomes soft and pliant. That tenderness pervades the language, and it's often like reading a dream - a mundane dream, but still a dream.
While this is a book about grief in a lot of ways, it doesn't ever take a turn into misery. It's more about the absence of bereavement, the way the departed leave holes in our lives that can never really be filled. And of course it's a coming of age story, too, one that focuses on that moment (or series of moments) where you begin to see your parents not as infallible all-knowing god figures but instead as people just as complex and in need of help as you are.
I really loved this, and I think it's a very beautiful book, but I think it suffers from its brevity. If I'd had another hundred pages with these characters I think this would have quite easily been one of my top reads this year. As it is, though, there's not quite enough meat here for me, and I was left wanting more. Sometimes that's a good thing, but in this case it felt lacking. Don't get me wrong, though; Western Lane is very good, and definitely worth reading.
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