Love, Stars and All That.

Love, Stars and All That. By Kirin Narayan. New York: Pocket Books, 1994. 311 pages. $20.00 paper.

Discussing the ethnic basis of national identity in his book National Identity (1991), Anthony Smith distinguishes between two views: the one that regards ethnicity as possessing some primordial quality, as "existing in nature, outside time" that includes "processes of genetic selection and inclusive fitness," and the other that regards ethnicity as purely a situational construct, a social construction.

Kirin Narayan's first novel, Love, Stars and All That, while apparently celebrating this second view and the need to accept temporality as the only form of stability, problematizes processes of subject construction where identity is both a given and a matter of acquisition. These processes are further intensified in a post-colonial setting in terms of the migrant's transnational movements and the construction of the nation's margins.

The novel emerges as a compelling narrative of the need to rearrange pieces of memory, and to perhaps evolve a new set of values to live by in multicultural America. While embodying some common experiences of the Indian diasporic community, the novel begins with the reality of the present and looks back over time, raising pertinent questions of identity construction and ethnic difference in the larger paradigm of immigrant experience.

The plot is simple enough: a young Indian girl, Gita, doing graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley, is caught on the one hand, between westernization, American style dating, an affair with a professor and the astrologer, Ganesh Kaka's prophecy; that her destiny is designed by cosmic movements on the other. Firoze, who is a Parsi and Gita's fellow student, can be seen negotiating the ambiguities and paradoxes of diasporic experience where cultural identity is a dialectical process of affirmation and negation. This plot is embedded within two structural narratives: the first narrative, a narrative of collage, moves rapidly towards dismantling causal and given centers of logic, points of origin, sources of authority, and fixed forms of representation, and the second narrative, a narrative of retrieval, unravels the construction of a splintered subjectivity governed by a gendered ideology in post-independence India.

In the search and construction of an ethnic community, specifically the Parsi community, Firoze discovers the paradox and instability of ethnic difference, in that, while perceiving that the individual could "belong to many groups and it is a matter of multiple subject-positions," he nevertheless participates in creating a narrative of return, a return to an originary past. He conceives of India, the land of his father and mother, the land of his birth, as his homeland. When Gita looks backward to India to regain that lost sense of origin and initial subjectivity, she confronts an India "split between two edges of the map," and she finds that she has to "jump back and forth between two incomplete Indias." The "incompleteness" of India also marks the dividedness of post-colonial female subjectivity. Made to conform to the ideals of the governess and educated at a convent in India, Gita learns to suppress her sexuality, dress like a lady, cut, polish and shape her fingernails regularly, speak English--in short, behave like a proper British lady. As the novel progresses, Gita understands the difference between passion and romantic self-delusion as she moves towards a heightened awareness of their sexuality.

At Berkeley, when Gita wears a sari to Professor Norvin's party, being feminine and being Indian mean two things: one, holding on "to every vestige of fixed difference from this rapidly moving American world," and two, deploying difference (sari as a sign of that difference), which "was a cultural authenticity she knew was fake." In this instance, the instability of cultural signification does not lead to the limitlessness of representation, but opens up spaces in which the signifier functions on the level of temporality and fixity, foregrounding the non-transparency of "authentic" representational practices.

In the larger paradigm of Asian American writing, in the tradition of writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Meena Alexander and Bapsi Sidhwa, Love, Stars and All That, moves beyond the initial experience of culture shock and the tension of assimilation by foregrounding the dynamics of the assimilatable and the unassimilatable in the construction of the cultural self in America.

I should add that my reading of the novel was a trifle dampened by a distinct tone of predictability that Firoze and Gita were toward some kind of romantic involvement. But Narayan's controlled narrative, alternating between first and third person voices, wisely avoids sentimental descriptions, and their encounters and confrontations are imbued with a sense of instability that informs the novel's structure. The novel makes compelling reading, and I for one am eagerly awaiting Narayan's next work of fiction.

John Muthyala Loyola University, Chicago