The Journal of Djuna Malik

Violence rends an Indian American clan in this plangent saga of family, migration, and estrangement.

Wieland’s narrative opens with the murder of Djuna Malik, an Indian American freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her two housemates by a racist man who lived down the street. Mourning her are her much older sister, Nisha, who raised her after their parents were killed in a terrorist attack in Mumbai, and her Lit professor, Liam McFadden, who feels she’s a talented writer and shows her class writings to Nisha after toying with the idea of plagiarizing them as material for his own novel. Liam and Nisha bond over Djuna’s journal and begin an affair. Nisha tells her own story to Liam, which includes her rape by an American youth in India, which led to further tragedy when her vengeful Indian lover at Harvard accidentally blew up himself, his brother, and uncle, with a bomb intended for Nisha’s attacker. She also ruminates on her tense marriage with Michael, a depressed white man with lots of guns and seething resentments. Meanwhile, Liam is wrestling with his own past growing up in Ireland. His father, a famous novelist, was so enraged that Liam’s mother published her own novel that she never finished another one, and he also plagiarized the work of Liam’s brother, Shamus, a talented and volatile poet. After he dropped dead of a heart attack during an argument with Shamus, more tragedy followed. Throughout, Nisha and Liam ponder the dead, while Nisha untangles yet more fraught relationships with Felicity, a friend and also the mother of Djuna’s killer, and Jamie, a troubled friend of Djuna’s.

Wieland’s novel works with big themes, including the experience of Indian immigrants eager to pursue the American dream but subject to racist affronts from microaggressions to homicide, and the problems of the story’s many angry men, with a first-term Donald Trump being a distant, presiding spirit who haunts the characters’ anxieties. It’s also an atmospheric portrait of the modern university, capturing the classroom torpor, the energetic zeal of its protest culture, the flurry of squabbling and empty-nest sorrow that surrounds Nisha’s relationship with Djuna as she leaves home, and the central role that prestigious degrees play in shaping the identity and self-esteem of the professional classes. (Djuna is distraught when her dream colleges reject her and she must settle for Chapel Hill, still one of the best schools in the country.) These are big themes, and Wieland explores them with psychological nuance and exactitude in prose that sometimes has a lyrical stillness and other times opens out into harsh, raw feeling (When tragedy strikes, Nisha’s “wailing afterwards was so loud and so long it seemed the sound came from the hospital building, out of the walls and floors, the drywall, the pipes, the wiring, the invisible Internet signal”). Wieland handles this sometimes unbearably dark material with evocative writing that packs an emotional wallop.

A harrowing tale of loss and remembrance, often bleak but also lit with a hard-earned wisdom and grace.