NEBRASKA

A child’s death sends an immigrant family into a tailspin.

Datta’s robust, multifaceted second novel turns on a tragedy: In 1992, Annakali Chatterjee, aka Anna, was at a New York train station with her son, Rabindra Lal, who had cerebral palsy. They were both struck by a train; Rabindra was killed, and Anna was sentenced to 15 years in prison for voluntary manslaughter. Was it an accident or was it intentional? Datta leaves that question pending while she asks another: What role did colonialism play in the incident? To explore that issue, Datta shifts the narrative back and forth in time, starting from the scheduled date of Anna’s release from prison; her husband, a Bangladeshi chemist named Prabir, and their two adult children, Neal and Nina, arrive to collect her but she’s already gone, taken a year earlier by a pair of evangelical Christians, renamed Ann Gubrud, and brought to the heartland. Meanwhile, one of the witnesses to Rabrindra’s death, a French psychoanalyst named Jean-Louis Katz (a kind of Bernard-Henri Lévy figure), pursues a friendship with Nina. The narrative has purportedly been assembled from Jean-Louis’ archives and scrutinized by a young Bengali psychoanalyst, B.X. Roy, who interrupts with footnoted questions, obsessive details, and no small amount of snark, questioning Jean-Louis’ version of events and suspecting he was blinkered to Anna’s suffering. It’s a busy novel, but it’s all delivered with verve, humor, and a bone-deep comprehension of the immigrant experience, and of the ugliness and neglect that accompany traditional assimilation. Beyond that, it’s simply an engrossing travelogue, from post-partition India to Bangladesh’s campaign for independence to Scotland (where Prabir had a checkered experience as a professor) to the state of the title and a revealing confrontation with Anna/Ann. In style and depth, the book recalls Pale Fire, Infinite Jest, and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, all big-swing metafictions that upend our understanding of history and humanity.

A sharp, cross-continental tale of heartbreak and identity.