Farah Ali follows her lauded story collection, People Want to Live (2021), with a first novel, The River, the Town, that shares similar aspects of spare, unblinking incisiveness. Moreover, it is delivered in three distinct voices covering three decades, with results not unlike reading interlinked short stories. These multiple perspectives form an intricate narrative, further complicated by unreliable characters.
In 1995, Baadal is a 15-year-old student growing up in the Town that "is considered part of the City." His name means "cloud," a "very special name" his mother chose as a talisman "so that [he] would not see a day of discomfort in [his] life"; his moniker a hopeful evocation of "cool shade and fresh water." Their Town, however, is suffering: the River, its life source, was once "wide and deep" but has shrunk to "a thin stream flowing weakly over the ground." Hunger and heat are a daily provocation. The early death of his two younger sisters has made Baadal a disdained only child. His mother, Raheela, is "sharp and thin as a knife," and just as cutting; his father just turns away from her relentless abuses. Baadal finds solace away from home, first with his two closest buddies, and later with an older woman, Meena, who will eventually become his wife.
While Ali deftly builds her narrative arc around Baadal's challenging coming of age into troubled young adulthood, she also inserts, embellishes, even questions Baadal's experiences and memories in chapters that allow the two most important women in his life--Raheela and Meena--to speak. Their lives not as Baadal's mother and wife, respectively, brilliantly reveal two individual women whose personal trajectories somehow came to be intertwined with Baadal's. Raheela recounts a childhood of familial loss; Meena has also survived devastated bonds and cleaved relationships.
Words like haraam, shalwar qameez, and biryani imprint Karachi-born Ali's fiction with a specific sense of place--suggesting South Asian culture and geography, perhaps not unlike her native Pakistan. But her insistence on the unnamed--the River, the Town, the City--endows her fiction with an undeniable universality. Climate disasters threaten the globe. Communities can splinter anywhere. Families in crises are ubiquitous. "There were stories they could accept, and those they could not," Meena observes, referring to how she is perceived by others with whom she hopes to make lasting connections. In this teeming maelstrom of (in)humanity, Ali posits a wrenching, everyman tragedy that shrewdly reads as prophetic warning, nimbly cast in potent storytelling. --Terry Hong, BookDragon
Shelf Talker: Farah Ali's impressive first novel reveals an unnamed town in crisis--its climate, its communities, its people--through the coming-of-age of an abused teen growing into crushing adulthood.