MRS VARMAN

An atmospheric novel in which a married woman has a gradual personal awakening.

Behera’s debut centers on Julia Varman, whom readers first meet when she’s happily married to “highflying businessman” Sachin. The revelation that Julia is infertile after a recent miscarriage disappoints them both; Sachin very much wants a son, but he seems unenthusiastic about the prospect of adopting a child even though the idea excites Julia. Behera broadens the story to recount the courtship between Sachin and Julia and goes on to introduce the cast of characters that fill out their respective families; the narrative also expands to introduce readers to a free-spirited young man named Vijay. His story—which is revealed as one of deprivation, desperation, and eventually even murder—is far more immediate than Julia’s, until the two narrative strands come together in an exciting climax. The elements of that climax and the violence that accumulates around Vijay’s plotline are counterbalanced with a chronicle of the souring love and growing disillusionment between Sachin and Julia. The author shows how the couple gradually and repeatedly encounter various ways that they are strangers to each other, so that even very late in the novel, when Sachin asks Julia when she started reading romance novels, she answers, “Between books of varied emotions I like hiding my own.”

Over the course of this novel, Behera tells a grand but sometimes pleasingly intimate story with care and a talent for pacing, and her realization of her three main characters deepens throughout the narrative. Vijay’s part in that story, at many points, feels more inherently dramatic than those of both Julia and her husband, but throughout, Behera maintains an effectively balanced approach that often favorably calls to mind the atmospherics of 19th-century novels. However, these positive qualities are frequently marred by prose that alternates between excessive ornateness (such as “Sachin stealthily entered with the cloak of his love and weapon of his concern to slay the beast of Julia's unhappiness”) and clichés—the phrases “got hitched,” “costs an arm and a leg,” and “they painted the town red” all happen on the same page, for example. Some sentences are both bloated and disjointed: “He was tempted and so grabbed the piggy bank, but just dallied with it because Mrs. Jadav came to call him down for a dinner of pizza, pasta, grilled chicken tacos, and pineapple meringue with children less hungry than him.” The author compensates for these weaknesses, though, by filling her novel with the sights and sounds of India, particularly in vivid descriptions of food. There’s a murder plot and other twists, and Vijay and his cast of supporting characters are always on hand to mitigate the less-interesting narrative of Julia’s life and keep it from excessively slowing the book that bears her name. That said, readers will easily be able to imagine a sleeker and stronger novel emerging from a rigorously edited version of this text.

An often absorbing, if flawed, story of one woman finding a surprising new path in life.