THERE IS ROOM FOR YOU

Bacon’s second novel (following Lost Geography, 2000), set in the early ’90s, meanders along to India with a recently separated New Yorker who delves with strenuous purpose into the history of her English-Indian mother’s upbringing.

Mid-30s Anna craves an adventurous change after her husband of five years, architect Mark, leaves her for a younger woman. Yet venturing to India for Anna is something like a betrayal to her tall, awkward mother Rose, who was raised motherless by her scientist father in Calcutta and was eventually sent back to England, in the mid-1940s, under shadowy circumstances. Stern, dispassionate, English Rose has brought up her own two children, Anna and James, now grown and productive citizens, with their American doctor father David in Concord, Massachusetts, never looking back to the Old Country, which she repudiated as being dull and difficult. Yet Anna, a nonprofit writer, armed with a journal Rose has written for her, finds enormous vibrancy in India as she travels from Delhi to Varanasi to Calcutta—such as meeting a younger Israeli man, Lev, whom Anna may or may not pursue, and stepping in to help some young foreign travelers after one of them has died after being hit by a car. Bacon introduces incidentally (and not always with logical organization) numerous subtexts—for example, Anna's desire for a child as one of the reasons for the collapse of her marriage, a desire that, indeed, resonates with her mother’s early story. Still, on the whole, the novel doesn’t coalesce, since most of the interesting action, both in Rose’s past and in Anna's failed marriage, has already happened. Immediate dramatization is missing, though Bacon does preserve a decorous tone in pretty sentences and expert characterization—as in the portrayal of Rose’s fierce, suspect, childhood servant Ayah. Admirably, the author resists handing up a predictable denouement—instead letting her tale find its own recalcitrant way.

Lovely descriptions of India in a presentation that, still, may puzzle as much as reward.