Book Review: "Transmission" by Hari Kunzru

I bought this novel when I visited my old place of employment, an Asian American bookstore near the UC Berkeley campus called Eastwind Books. The owner Bea recommended it, so I bought it, but the title seemed to unappealing to me that I stuffed it on a shelf for a few years. It was surprisingly well crafted.

Here is the synopsis on the back of the book:
Indian computer programmer Arjun Mehta spends his days as a lowly assistant virus-tester in California, pining away for his free-spirited colleague Christine - until he gets laid off like so many of his Silicon Valley peers. In an act of utter desperation to keep his job, he releases a mischievous but destructive virus that has major unintended consequences. As world order begins to unravel, so does Arjun’s sanity, in a rollicking cataclysm that reaches Europe, Bollywood, and, not to coincidentally, the glamorous star of Arjun’s favorite movie.

This modern novel is smart, snarky, & hilarious. Jane Maslin of the New York Times compares him to Zadie Smith, and I agree. First of all, like the writer of White Teeth, Kunzru has not one protagonist but three. The story revolves mostly around Arjun Mehta, but he also spends a fair amount of time on Guy Smith, an ambitious, self-important British self-help guru & Leela Zahir, the world famous Bollywood star for whom the virus is named. Secondly, similar to Smith, Kunzru is convincingly knowledgeable about a diverse set of cultures and lifetyles. He astutely depicts the physical & cultural isolation of immigrants in California, the lush landscape of Washington state, & the smothering family & blatant sexism of Indian society. He is cleverly & sardonically aware of the outlooks & insecurities of different groups of people, from the resentful Indian programmers on H1 visas awaiting work to the successful but trapped movie star struggling under the thumb of a mafia boss or demanding mother to the desperate young man searching for happiness & yearning for the perfect endings of Bollywood films. All of Kunzru’s unrelated story lines come together in the end in a satisfying, culminating resolution.

At first glance, the writer’s style is mysterious & smart. It’s got a smarty-pants attitude that might come off as both portentous & mocking. But as the plot progresses, Kunzru gives complex insight to each of this characters, & his occasional commentary on different cultural and nationalistic customs is humorous & refreshing. On the downside, the computer tech speak & modern cultural references confused me. None of that impedes on the enjoyable experience of reading this novel though.

Here are a few random lines from the novel:

“More champagne, sir? A drink of water?”
He took the glass from the smiling female attendant, unself-consciously bathing in the soft-porn ambience of the moment. Mentally he noted the experience as a credit on the airline’s emotional balance sheet. He enjoyed the attendant’s android charm, the way this disciplined female body reminded him it was just a tool, the uniformed probe-head of the large corporate machine in which he was enmeshed. (p. 11)

Anyone on foot in suburban California is one of four things: poor, foreign, mentally ill or jogging...If the soccer moms zipping by in their SUVs registered him at all, it was a blur of dark skin, a minor danger signal flashing past on their periphery. To the walking man the soccer moms were more cosmological than human, gleaming projectiles that dopplered past him in a rush of noise and dioxins, as alien and indifferent as stars. (p.37)

Check out Transmission!