Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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My own process seems unwise to me because I know I’ll eventually cut sections that I’ve spent weeks or months going over, but I have no other way. I had never considered how much of the game unfolds in that hollow pop, or how much of my profession depended on that lonely sound. All this to say, I’m not sure how best to categorise Western Lane but I’m interested in how readers read it. It seemed such an off-the-wall idea but it brought to my mind something Lorrie Moore suggested in her introduction to The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories About Childhood: that the acquisition of knowing and the subject of knowing or not knowing are ‘the unshakeable centre of any childhood story’. Soon Pa is neglecting his job as an electrician and turning a blind eye to his family’s financial troubles, not to mention their emotional ones.

The tension is heightened by squash-obsessed, emotionally uncommunicative Pa; fearful Aunt Ranjan is the obstacle that stands in Gopi’s way. This challenge was particularly pronounced when she had to switch between the perspective of the child and the retrospective narrator. It is not so much the shot itself that Gopi is hearing, but that echo, the empty reverb, the lonely response as the ball’s impact gives the striker a split second to retreat to the T, the center of the court, and prepare to counteract her opponent’s responding shot. Gopi is attuned to subtle details that offer clues to the inner lives of the adults around her: Pa’s failure to fix a radiator, low voices in the garden at night, a spilled glass of chaas. Given the familiar storyline presented, The Guardian's Caleb Klaces noted that readers "might expect Western Lane to feel formulaic, but it doesn’t.Her stories have been published in the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly and the Dublin Review and she was the recipient of the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction.

Language is hampered by stammers and cultural barricades as well as by things too scary and distressing to sound out. She becomes aware that Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan, who have no children of their own, want her to live with them in Edinburgh. Her literary accomplishments also include being honored with the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a prestigious recognition bestowed by the Paris Review to acknowledge exceptional works of fiction published in the magazine during the preceding year. The sisters have always spoken Gujarati, their mother tongue, but not well enough to converse easily with their own mother, and so when she was alive the girls had learned to read her body and to communicate by being physical in her presence.When Gopi occasionally remembers something about her mother, it is visceral – watching Wimbledon while eating strawberries with sugar. There is a love interest, Ged, whose mother intervenes at just the right moment for the plot (and the wrong moment for Gopi). Cautioned by a concerned relative to find a healthy outlet for his daughters, Pa turns the family’s casual weekly squash game at a local sports center into daily, determined training sessions. Gopi cares how her feet fall on the court, the curve of her arm through the air, how close she can keep to the “T”. As I began writing, it made sense to me – the way attention is focused outwards in the game, the concentration, the movement of bodies in sync with one another.