A BOMB PLACED CLOSE TO THE HEART

Based on the lives of two real people who met and married at Stanford University during World War I, this novel offers a window into early-20th-century radical politics.

Indranath Mukherjee, a Bengali revolutionary, has come to California in 1917 awaiting an arms cache from the German government. While in Palo Alto, he meets graduate student Cora Trent at a party and the two are soon inseparable, united as much by their chemistry as their devotion to revolutionary causes, despite the disapproval of friends both South Asian and American. The real-life biographies of M.N. Roy—known as the founder of communist parties in Mexico and India—and Evelyn Trent inform the adventures of Indra and Cora, who interact with remarkable fictional figures including a university president, an Irish mystic, an expatriate Bengali leader, and the editor of a leftist newspaper. Each of these introduces some facet of the era’s political and social concerns, from eugenics to birth control, communism to nationalism. The author, a historian, has clearly done the research; unfortunately, so much research that it overtakes the throughlines of an authentic love story, and of Cora’s chafing at the bonds of wifehood and the way they affect her identity. Scenes proceed too quickly from those with overarching political import (discussions about the Zimmermann telegram) to others focused on emotional heft (concocting a home-cooked dessert for an elder). Interspersed with the action are interior meditations from the couple, many of which contain beauty and wisdom, such as Indra’s realization that after the initial pleasure of passion, what had grown between them was “an invitation into frailty and mutual aid.” Unfortunately, many of those sections suffer from overwrought prose: “To be his wife or to be herself, that was the choice, but all love is drunkenness, and like the drunk unable to walk a straight line, there arose in her some uncontrollable bodily urge to go between both, to stumble between fidelity and solitude.”

Fascinating but too dense in its attempts to show empathy for two brilliant people facing bigotry as they learn to love.