"My mother always told me to be a good boy. I suspect she knew that I wasn't," Akash Amin explains as Neel Patel's novel "Tell Me How to Be" begins. This melancholy drama is structured as a first-person duet between narrators Renu and Akash Amin, a mother and son who have been singing past each other their whole lives. Fittingly, Renu and Akash don't address one another, but instead each speaks to a longed-for "you," a perpetual, beloved, missed connection, the particulars of which Patel gradually reveals.
Akash is 28, living in Los Angeles, trying to break through as a songwriter. His father cautioned him never to tell his mother that he's gay, and although living inauthentically with his family has contorted Akash with pain and contributed to his alcoholism, he keeps this promise. "Tell Me How to Be" is a book of full of longing and regret, like the R&B ballads Akash labors to create.
Renu summons Akash and her older son Bijal to her palatial home in suburban Illinois to commemorate the one-year anniversary of their father Ashok's death, and to empty the house so she can sell it and move to London. Renu grew up in a family of Indian immigrants in Tanzania before heading to London for college. There, her family arranged a marriage for her with Ashok, a genial man who became a successful doctor in Illinois. But Renu has a secret — she loved another man in London before Ashok, a Muslim named Kareem. The longing for Kareem has made her never satisfied. "I have languished in this town with its Walmart and its Applebees," she explains.
The three remaining members of the Amin family converge at the home at a time of personal crises that they've hidden from the others. The secrets have curdled Renu and Akash so that they mock or use certain people who befriend them. Broke Akash lives with a financially secure white boyfriend that he cheats on, and Renu makes bitter jokes about easy Midwestern targets — such as the white women in her book group who call their favorite wine "Sauvi-B."
In this soulful, moody novel, Patel shows how Akash and Renu suffer from the impossibility of emotional honesty within their Indian immigrant community in the Midwest, its norms enforced by gossip and social snubs. There's an inherent forgiveness in the two-narrator structure of this novel, recognizing that people who've made life difficult for others are themselves laboring under the burdens of their own thwarted hopes. Patel charts Akash and Renu's quests, separate, but ultimately intertwined, to express the truth, leave bitterness behind, and finally become free.
Jenny Shank's story collection "Mixed Company" won the George Garrett Fiction Prize, and her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Poets & Writers and the Atlantic. She teaches in the Mile High MFA program at Regis University in Denver.
Tell Me How to Be
By: Neel Patel.
Publisher: Flatiron Books, 304 pages, $26.99.
