Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In 2006, writer Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. Now, nearly 20 years later, Kiran's new novel has been shortlisted for the Booker. It took her 20 years to write it, but that was time well spent. The novel has been called 'a masterpiece.' It's titled The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. At the center of the story are two young people who have left their home in India to build a future in America. Sonia wants to be a novelist, but when a sort of toxic relationship brings her to New York City, she finds herself adrift. In a moment of despair. She asks her family to broker an arranged marriage.

Her grandparents have their eyes set on Sunny, the grandson of their neighbors. Sunny also lives in New York. He works for the AP and lives with his American girlfriend. Sunny rejects the idea of an arranged marriage, and he and Sonia move on with their lives. Until one day their paths cross back at home in India. Despite the original failed match, they discover they might be a good fit after all. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a love story. A tale of immigration, a generational saga, a story of changing India, a chronicle of the creative process, and so much more. In addition to making the Booker Prize shortlist, the novel is also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. It is out now, and I'm joined in-studio by author Kiran Desai. It is nice to meet you.

Kiran Desai: Thank you. I'm honored to be here.

Alison Stewart: How is this book that is in my hands, this 700-page book, how is it different from the book that you set out to write?

Kiran Desai: Oh, it was a discovery. It was, I think, what I was after; I knew I wanted to write about how modernity affects us spiritual beings in very elemental matters of love and loneliness. I had the idea of writing about romantic loneliness and also writing a big DC, globalized love story. I thought that we needed that. A big modern-day love story of two Indians out in the big world.

What surprised me as I was writing about Sonia and Sunny, their families, going back to the time of their grandparents, their parents, talking of how different love stories affect Sunny and Sonia's love stories, the stories they encounter. I was going back historically, but I was also traveling across geographies. The book takes place in Mexico, in New York, in Venice, in Italy, in India. I realized that I could broaden the scope of this book and not just focus on romantic loneliness, but also the great divides between nations.

The rage between nations that we are seeing playing out right now. The distrust between races, huge divide, class divide that just seems to be growing larger and larger. Feminism, promise of feminism, failure of feminism. The natural world vanishing, and the vanishing creatures of our world. The forest vanishing. The past of our parents, grandparents, just of falling away now.

I decided to see all of those things through the lens of loneliness, and so the scope of the book changed, and then it grew longer, and then it grew longer. At one time, it was 5,000 pages. Can you believe it?

Alison Stewart: I had that issue down the road, but since you brought it up. It's 700 pages, but it was 5,000 pages.

Kiran Desai: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn in those additional 4,300 pages that didn't make it into the novel, but informed the novel?

Kiran Desai: I followed a vast cast of characters and was also thinking of books that I really loved, love stories that I read while writing this book. Like Anna Karenina, for example, or Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Also, Márquez, the Great Master Maestro, Love in the Time of Cholera. Thinking of a large cast of characters of how every love story maybe includes the stories of other family members.

Alison Stewart: Did you read those separately? Did you stop, read a book that meant something to you, and go back to writing, or was this while you were writing?

Kiran Desai: It was while I was writing. Reading. A lot of those books came into these pages because Sunny and Sonia are both writers. One is a journalist and one is an aspiring novelist. What they read deeply informs their love story, and their lives change depending on what they're reading. There's a lot of art in this book. I was following that idea as well.

5,000 pages. One of the stories was hard to cut out, was about Sunny's close friend Satya, who is a doctor in rural Kentucky. I'm so fascinated by the story. That story of that one Indian, that one foreigner in rural America, which happens often because that's a particular visa category that you can sign up for a program, I think it's called the Appalachian Program, that sends a doctor to rural America as part of an immigration process. I was fascinated by that. Such a different immigration story from Sunny's and Sonia's in New York City and mine. That interested me. That was one of the things that got left out.

Alison Stewart: As you were writing the book, and all of these ideas are coming to you, you obviously just kept writing them. You didn't think, "Oh, I don't need that. Oh, I don't need that." You just kept writing them. Why did you keep writing them?

Kiran Desai: I was also searching for this novel. I was creating material. I was creating material for this book and perhaps for other books. I also followed a story into 1920s Germany, actually. Interested in the rise of nationalism in India, following those ideas. I was thinking both intellectually and emotionally. I was describing it to someone the other day. I said that I think I was working, like one of the characters in this book says, like a bee, an ant, or an earthworm. Every day, taking a bit of real life and transposing it into artistic life, transferring it into pages.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kiran Desai. Am I saying it right?

Kiran Desai: Yes. Perfect.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking about your new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. People change a lot over the course of 20 years.

Kiran Desai: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What's one way that you changed as a person which affected the novel?

Kiran Desai: I became very solitary because I was working so hard and the book was so large. I vanished into the pages of this book. I became incredibly stubborn.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] Stubborn?

Kiran Desai: Yes, because of course, people were saying, "Finish the book, Kiran." I didn't notice the passing of years, except for on my birthday. It was always a fright. I was incredibly scared on my birthday when I realized another year had gone by and I had not finished my book. There was something in me that is fascinating, actually, to me. I don't quite understand it myself because, despite myself, I get up and I go straight to my desk and I will carry on working and I will not be swayed by what anyone is saying. I was not wrapping up the book, I was getting up, going to my work. I had a very, very strong discipline. I already had it while writing my last book, Inheritance of Loss, but it became quite extreme. I think I was living quite austerely, very quietly, stubbornly. It's kind of like spiritual discipline that--

Alison Stewart: Took you into a monastery to write.

Kiran Desai: Yes, it was like that. It was really like a spiritual discipline. Although I live in Jackson Heights, it's incredibly busy outside my window.

Alison Stewart: May I ask you a little bit of a blunt question? How did you navigate with your publisher and with your editor, taking 20 years to write a novel?

Kiran Desai: Well, I was lucky because who keeps the faith for so long? And my editors did.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Kiran Desai: When they talk about publishing being a brutal business, that was not true for me. I had this wonderful editor for a long time by the name of Robin Desser. Then she retired. That was one thing about taking 20 years.

Alison Stewart: She retired.

Kiran Desai: Yes. The publisher who bought this book actually passed away. Things happen like that, Alison. That was hard. I have a new editor, David Ebershoff, so nice for me to mention their names on the radio-

Alison Stewart: Of course.

Kiran Desai: -and honor them because they. They put no pressure on me. It's just astounding.

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:10:13] [crosstalk]

Kiran Desai: Neither did my agent. They just trusted me. It was years before they saw a draft, and then it was several more years before they saw another draft.

Alison Stewart: They believed in you, though.

Kiran Desai: They did.

Alison Stewart: That's got to feel really good.

Kiran Desai: It's absolutely astonishing and amazing. Yes.

Alison Stewart: I understand your mother is your reader, your first reader.

Kiran Desai: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why is your mom your first reader?

Kiran Desai: My mom is a novelist, Anita Desai. We came to the United States together. She left, I think, when she was 50 years old. She'd been writing in India. It's astounding for a woman to be working that way in the '60s and '70s, and a woman who was married with four children. She had that discipline of going to her desk. She collected books from all over the world. I grew up with her bookshelves. I'm really working out of what I inherited from her. I owe her so much. Her writing eventually opened a door. Her work was being published overseas. We kind of understood, as children, her growing fame when foreign publishers would come and stay with us in New Delhi, in India, glamorous translators from Scandinavia would arrive in their kaftans. Beautiful French translator, go to an ashram, come back with all her tummy troubles.

One day, I think she was invited, eventually, to be a writer in residence in Cambridge, in England. I was the youngest child, the youngest of four, so she took me with her. Then, she started teaching a semester, a year at Smith and Mount Holyoke, eventually, MIT. We came together. She had to learn how to drive, how to teach. I had to go to American high school. All of these things.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious what your desk looks like. You said you get up and you go to your desk. What does it look like?

Kiran Desai: Well, those 5,000 pages, there are many piles of 5,000 pages. Yes. There are lots and lots of piles of paper, each one bound up with bands so as to separate it from the other piles of paper.

Alison Stewart: Really?

Kiran Desai: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Does it face a wall? Do you face a window? Where does it face?

Kiran Desai: It faces my backyard in Jackson Heights. Sometimes I work in my kitchen. I like to work in my kitchen. I work in my kitchen and I go up to my desk. It overlooks an apricot tree-

Alison Stewart: Apricot tree.

Kiran Desai: -in Jackson Heights. Yes, full of squirrels. It being Queens and New York, rats.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Comes with the territory.

Kiran Desai: Very Jackson Heights rats and squirrels. Somebody told me, "Just spray everything with chili pepper to keep them away from your apricots," but they love chili pepper.

Alison Stewart: Chili pepper apricots.

Kiran Desai: Yes.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kiran Desai. We're speaking about her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is author Kiran Desai. We're speaking about her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Sonia and Sunny both start, in this novel, with relationships with white romantic partners. Sonia's dating an unstable artist, and Sunny's dating this woman who is from Kansas. What's drawing each person into this relationship?

Kiran Desai: You mean with each other? To each other, eventually.

Alison Stewart: Actually mean with their white partners.

Kiran Desai: Oh, with the other partners. This is interesting. They come from a very Westernized background in India, English-speaking, a community of people who are brought up, barely to even touch their own country, who grew up without taking a bus, without visiting a public restroom. They're brought up to leave. I think there's one scene in the book where somebody observes that in the living rooms of this class, there are no children anymore. The children are in Oxford, Cambridge, Sloan, Kettering, McKinsey, all over the world, but not at home. They are all these parents on their own, actually, growing old alone because their children have been expected to leave and excel overseas.

Sunny and Sonia both come from that background. Sunny, for example, knows, although nobody will say so. This is why we read fiction, because we can say things in pages that people don't utter out loud. He's expected to find a white girlfriend. He is expected to belong to move towards whiteness and privilege in a way.

Alison Stewart: Assimilate in a way.

Kiran Desai: And to assimilate, yes. He's been sent out with the language, the habits, all of that, prepared to do that. He does. He's living in Fort Greene at the time when Fort Greene is becoming very gentrified. The book is set back in the past a little bit. They're so beautiful in the mirror. They're enchanted by the image of themselves. Ulla is with this man from overseas. She's being adventurous. She's left Kansas, although at one time she says it's easier for an Indian to be in New York City than it is for a woman from the Midwest, and New York is more welcoming to a foreigner. That was also, I think, an interesting observation.

Sunny knows that he is proud of this image. He's proud of it, but he knows that he's ashamed to be proud for the reason he's proud. He begins to tear apart this beautiful picture in the mirror and to undo it despite himself.

Alison Stewart: Would you like to read a passage from the book?

Kiran Desai: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I think that would be great. This is a good place for you to read.

Kiran Desai: In fact, this is the marriage proposal from the grandparents arriving in Fort Greene. This is sent by Sonia's grandparents to Sunny's grandparents and then sent by his mother on to New York. "And so it was one gusty day in May of 1997. A mailman trudged down the streets of Fort Greene in Brooklyn and plucked a letter from his bag. It almost flew from his hands, but it didn't, and he dropped it through the stiff brass mail slot of a sober liver colored brownstone where it lay on the dulled parquet until Lou Orsini, who'd lived forever on the second floor, scooped it up, almost tossed it out with the Panda Garden delivery menus, but didn't. He saw it in time and propped it on the stairs.

When Ulla and Sunny returned from the Korean deli with toilet paper, tofu, sprouts, and six assorted artisan ales, Ulla almost trod on it, but didn't. She made pincers of her fingers and brought it up, despite her hands being full. Ulla was the girlfriend Sunny had never happened to mention to his family, although for over a year now, they had shared a lease, a bed, a Con Ed utility bill, a laundry basket, and on some absent-minded occasions, a toothbrush.

'What does your mother say?' asked Ola, unlacing her sneakers. Sunny would forever regret not bundling the letter away, but it was so astonishing that his guard was down. 'Look,' he exclaimed, 'I have a marriage proposal.' Oh, how could he have forgotten that love, when it arrives, always twinned to its destructive force as inevitably as God and devil, life and death, home and the leaving of it. That information collected during sweeter moments will be turned to ammunition and discharged during war, that what is innocent in the morning will not remain so by nightfall.

Because his mother's letters held grotesque fascination for Ulla, who found them as riveting as Masterpiece Theater, Sunny was in the habit of handing the pages to her after he'd skimmed through. Ulla opened the second envelope enclosed within the first. 'And what's this?' she pounced. And there was Sonia, tall, slender, a braid down to her waist, standing against snow-laden furs in a disconcerting curry colored coat."

Alison Stewart: That was Kiran Desai reading from The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. In getting these letters from home, it reminded me how generational the story is as well. What did you want to explore about the generational differences between these families?

Kiran Desai: These are in fact the days of aerograms, which was my first days in the United States and going to college. They let these blue aerograms would come from India. In other words, you'd wait for your parents to call in the phone booth in your college. What interested me about the different generations was that in the past of Sunny and Sonia's grandparents, and perhaps also their parents, an Indian love story would have been centered in one community, one class, one religion, most likely one place.

In Sonia and Sunny's generation, though, out in the big world, it's so much a matter of chance who you might or might not meet. They keep asking themselves, "Why this person, why not someone else? Why this place? Why not another place?" so it's a completely different story. They're seeking love and a sense of belonging. At the same time, their own sense of self is turning so fluid, and sometimes the sense of self is completely dislocated, displaced because of the experiences they're going through. The older generation, I think Sonia says at one point, her grandparents, they wouldn't have even mentioned the word love. They're rooted somewhere much deeper, more elemental.

Alison Stewart: How does she feel about that?

Kiran Desai: I think there's another character who says he longs for that old-fashioned love because there are people so innocent that they don't even know that loneliness exists. These are people who have never lived alone, never slept in a room alone, never eaten a meal alone. At the same time, of course, it's a privilege to be able to travel and to make choices. Sonia and Sunny are very privileged. As with many things in the book, they feel, I think, two ways. They feel two ways about many things. Two contradictory ways.

Alison Stewart: Do you think this is a love story at the heart of it?

Kiran Desai: Yes, it is, I think. Sunny and Sonia don't meet all that often, but when they do--

Alison Stewart: I think it's 200 pages before they meet. [laughs]

Kiran Desai: 200 pages before they meet. That's right. They both have had very different experiences, but it's a love story. It's also a story that's divided and held together by the spaces that separate them. These divisions and rifts that they come up against when they are trying to get together, thinking of getting together, all the divisions that they have to come up against. In a way, Alison, I think it's actually a very old-fashioned love story.

Alison Stewart: This book has gotten so much acclaim. What does that mean to you?

Kiran Desai: I'm thrilled for Sonia and Sunny, really. They're characters that I became very close to. Of course, it's so wonderful to put out a book and to have it be loved in this way. Maybe I hope it bridges some of the loneliness.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. My guest has been author Kiran Desai. Thank you so much for coming to the studio.

Kiran Desai: Thank you very much.