Mumbai New York Scranton
by Tamara Shopsin
First Posted March 2014
More than ten years later, and I remember loving this book, liking this review, and not remembering at all what the twist I was so into was. I bet I could read this again and get a lot of joy.
Except for things I don’t plan on experiencing personally, I don’t read reviews until I’ve read or eaten or watched the subject matter. Other impressions tend to color my opinions, if only a little. I tend to maintain my own opinion once I’ve formed it, but if I haven’t yet decided what I feel about something, other interpretations tend to override the creation of my own view.
For similar reasons I try to avoid reading back covers, dust jackets, Netflix synopses—I know I am going to read the book or watch the episode and I’d rather not try to predict how the episode or book is going to unfold based upon the cursory data I’ve gleaned from the summary. I try not to be obnoxious about it; I don’t run screaming from the room with my fingers in my ears when someone is talking about the finale of Breaking Bad, though I’ve apathetically stalled on the series at least a half-dozen times since it began. I saw The Sixth Sense three or four years after release and had no idea it was built to be a vehicle for a “twist,” let alone what that twist was. I simply prefer to know nothing about games, books, shows, and movies beforehand. I typically won’t even look at a restaurant menu until I’ve sat at the table.
Mumbai New York Scranton was recommended to me by my dad in June of 2013. He didn’t tell me anything about it. Which I appreciated. It took me a long time to finally get a copy. Eighteen library books came and went while I watched my place in the queue tick down: thirteenth on three copies; eighth on three copies; fifth on three copies. It sat on my library request page for over eight months. I’d been seeing a thumbnail image of the cover for three-quarters of a year—the familiarity may excuse, or at least explain, why I skipped the dust jacket blurb. I knew I was going to read it, because my dad suggested that I do. The book itself didn’t have any work to do besides show up.
Waiting for Mumbai New York Scranton had become its own thing—I emailed a cut & paste of the library’s image files every few weeks to my dad as a gentle reminder that I hadn’t brushed off his recommendation, that there were six people who had to borrow it before I could. I constructed narratives about the three lucky people that had copies—where they worked, where they read, what I would do if I spotted the book out in the wild: “Hey, could you read a little faster, please?” or “Oh, I’m waiting for that book! Please don’t read it aloud!”
Spending that much time with something—not actually with it, but with your manufactured image of what it will be—creates some idiosyncrasies. It becomes the fussy faucet that houseguests can’t get to stop dripping but you have grown so accustomed to you don’t even see it anymore, can finesse it without conscious thought. I’d built a story of what the story would be: why my dad recommended it to me; what tied the three cities together—I grew up an hour-plus from Scranton and have been there dozens of times. Perhaps there’s some small-town wistfulness, some insight I’m intended to uncover?
I now live in Manhattan, so perhaps the “New York” portions would have bits that he thinks I can relate to? He is right:
We pass a sign that says “Triborough Bridge Renamed RFK Bridge.” I freak out. Why would the city rename a bridge everyone knows? The name isn’t even debatably offensive, like the Tomahawk Chop. Unless the city now finds logic offensive.
“It goes over three boroughs!” I shout.
So I’m not looking for absolution—only filling in context—when I say I started this book with a lot of baggage. I thought it was fiction. I was trying to guess what my dad wanted from it, what the author was trying to give to me. I had months to think about it, to concoct my version of events from only the small .jpg of the avocado and lime-green cover with the sketch of the hand wearing a watch and holding thorny roses. I expected a bittersweet romance: “I start bawling. Jason hates it when I cry. Not in a sweet “Don’t wanna see you cry, honey” way. More in a “That isn’t going to help anything” Spock way.” Mumbai New York Scranton does not tell that story.
I’m not sure where I was in the book when I first caught of glimpse of the word “memoir.” I was startled to see that it was real. The story felt too focused, too concise to be real. Much of modern fiction eschews the smooth polish of a tight narrative to focus on weighty text, replete with ambiguities, to emulate the vast and incomprehensible formlessness of reality. Unmoored fiction flutters from scene to scene, promulgating its reality on being unanticipatingly strange, unexpectedly startling—non-narrative, like life itself. So if Mumbai Scranton New York wasn’t a memoir, it might be taken by some to be too tightly woven to be strong modern fiction; too seamless to reflect our actual reality of undesigned, meaningless absurdity.
Once you’ve squared your mind with the fact that it is, in reality, a memoir, it’s time to figure out what type: its title is Mumbai, so you know it’s a travel memoir. It’s Scranton and New York, too, so maybe not.
When you’re at the point you figure it out, Mumbai New York Scranton takes your breath away. It happens, and you aren’t prepared for it, because it actually happened. Is still happening. To the author, because it a direct account of her life:
Riding over the Brooklyn Bridge, people smile at me but don’t move out of the way. They are posing for a picture.
The cap to my bell was stolen. It no longer has a reason to exist. I part the crowds by chanting “Bicycle, bicycle, bicycle,” as if I am selling a frozen treat on a stick. The bike veers left and almost takes out a Chinese couple. I apologize and continue on like a pilot with engine failure.
The twist—the moment when everything falls into place and what happened before suddenly makes sense on more levels than you thought possible—might not be a shock to you. Perhaps the person that suggested the book to you told you what type of memoir it was. Perhaps you read someone else’s review. You can’t know it’s coming from synopsis because someone wisely excised it, though I imagine it was a protracted battle with the marketing department since it would be a good bulletpoint.
But if you were caught unawares, it simply has to be fiction. The story had to have been plotted out on a big dry erase board—bright red strings hanging between sections—outlining hidden connections the reader will not—cannot—work out until later. The foreshadowing is so obvious that you never see it. And, after the revelation, you don’t need to reread the book because the author reminds you of what this new revelatory information does to everything that came before.
I don’t know if knowing there’s a twist will diminish its weight. It might. It doesn’t matter. The writing is enough, even without the plot—the reality—to drive the reader. The perspective is singular:
The last time Minda picked me up off a corner was after I got my wisdom teeth pulled. I was barefoot holding my shoes in one hand and waving at her with the other. I was grinning ear to ear, surprised and overjoyed to see her. I was high on laughing gas and anesthesia.
Before surgery the dentist asked, “Is the laughing gas working?” I asked back, “How do you know if it’s working?” The dentist replied, “Do you feel different than you did five minutes ago?” I became hysterical and said, “I always feel different than five minutes ago.”
The third largest public library system in the world has three copies in circulation. Three people at a time can experience a story that is too perfect to be good fiction. It is a peerless memoir.