THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PADMA

An academic couple weathers pandemic quarantine in two different versions of what their marriage might have been.

In the opening pages of Viswanathan’s third novel, a woman named P, her husband, Mac, and their two children, Aakash and Deepa, come together in the kitchen on the day in March 2020 when the world shuts down. Cracks already exist in the marriage—P, a tenured professor in translation, loves her job but feels the strain of being a South Asian native of Montreal in the deeply conservative American South. Mac, whose work on the intersections of “industrial design, corporate structures, and feminism” is what first brought them to Arkansas, is in danger of being denied tenure but refuses to jump through the tenure committee’s hoops, thus threatening the whole family’s stability. As quarantine wears on, those cracks are widened beyond repair by a truly disturbing secret P uncovers on Mac’s laptop one night, pushing her into a burgeoning self-reliance that takes the form of a Maggie Nelson–style book about the color chartreuse. On a parallel course, a woman named P, her husband, Mat, and their children, Nikhil and Sarojini, come together in the kitchen in March 2020 on the day the world shuts down. P and Mat are both tenured professors, both more-or-less fulfilled in their careers, though while Mat loves Arkansas and the economic freedom it affords them, P feels she has been “trailing him since they fell in love” and longs for recognition on her own terms. When P is accepted for a fellowship at the Sorbonne to work on her book about the color chartreuse, Mat’s response destabilizes the careful fairness of their marriage. Periodically interrupted by passages from P’s chartreuse essay, the twin narratives mirror each other in different lights—one revealing the inequities in a marriage founded on secrecy, one exploring the consequences of unfettered choice. The result provides ample fodder for a reader interested in the knotty problems of preserving individual identity within a family or society; institutional inequity in academia and beyond; or just the possibilities inherent to a woman who gives herself time alone to think. Unfortunately, the author makes structural choices that allow the sections on chartreuse to float untethered from either of the two P’s narratives. The result is the creation of a third P—the author of the essay—who, rather than bringing all the P’s together, muddles the tension of the novel and allows it to hang, slightly baggy, from the structural armature of its own form.

Heady, intellectual, ambitious, and not fully realized.