BOOK REVIEW: A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta
By Paul Theroux, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hardcover, 2010, 279 pages, $26
It's common knowledge that writers often craft stories about writing. I've found that novels dealing primarily with writing and writer's block are usually either exceptionally good or painfully bad. Paul Theroux's "A Dead Hand" falls somewhere in between. It's vital attention to detail, to the startling vividness of Calcutta and the interior life of the narrator dazzles, but at times the central mystery and romance become secondary to Theroux's vibrant exposition.
The protagonist and narrator, self-proclaimed "hack" travel writer Jerry Delfont, offers numerous digressions about his "dead hand" (writer's block), his empty head and what he feels is the culmination of an aimless life spent evading responsibility and relationships under the guise of work.
Jerry, when the story begins, is adrift in Calcutta -- merely waiting for the monsoon and bemoaning his puttering career. As much as this novel muses about the writing process and its challenges, it also chronicles the foreigners' experience in Calcutta, described myriad times in vivid and original detail.
Calcutta is described as "a city of deformities," with "exhalations of decay." The dominant architecture is cobbled together, mismatched: "The city went on growing, yet it still looked rickety and ruinous, and in areas of faded elegance and dramatic misery a bad smell lingered, haunted and human." The smells in the sprawling city take on a life of their own, so pungent they seem to emit sound. These explanations of setting to me really set the novel apart from other, romanticized descriptions of India that authors frequently embrace. Although Jerry has experience traveling in developing countries, he's just as fatigued, hot and cantankerous as any casual tourist might be after a few weeks.
Merrill Unger, under-the-radar philanthropist, giver of tantric massages and possessor of "healing hands," comes to exert a power over Delfont that pushes the reader's belief. Jerry meets Merrill, after receiving a strange letter from her one day, in his hotel room. She wants his help in clearing the name of her son's Indian friend Rajat (Merrill is American), who apparently awoke one night in a nearby hotel room to discover a dead boy on the floor. Jerry goes to meet her and is immediately bewitched by her comely looks, though more so by her sensual massages. He begins, in short, to worship her.
Their drawn-out involvement is what roots Jerry to Calcutta, imbues him with purpose (a desire to help Merrill at all costs) and even enlivens his "dead hand." Merrill herself is a fascinating character to behold. It's hard to know whether to mistrust her grandiose speeches and affected mannerisms or praise her generosity with the children she rescues from the streets.
Perhaps it's the obvious one-sidedness of their relationship, but I found myself less interested in the Merrill/Jerry narrative and more absorbed by the depictions of Calcutta life.
As Jerry scrambles to piece together the mystery of the dead boy, he runs up against a petulant hotel manager, confusing clues (including a child's severed "dead" hand) and uncooperative locals. India's infamous caste system manifests itself in the way people ascribe responsibility to those worse off: "The mission in this blame-shifting society was to win at any cost and to be blameless, and the simplest way was to rubbish the underlings. In multilayered India there was always someone lower than you." While Jerry interrogates a factory owner about potential child labor, the man delights in withholding information as a show of power: "An Indian Man of this sort got more pleasure out of saying that something was impossible than offering to be helpful. ... Being obstructive inflated his importance." These, along with other descriptions of certain upper class Indian men as "spoiled boys," makes it clear that Jerry holds no reservations about judging what he sees as the Indian psyche. At times the unflattering portraits seem overwhelming. For the most part, however, they add bite and a harsh vibrancy to the story.
Theroux himself makes a cameo appearance during a meeting with Delfont, and the characters' exchange is a hilarious and insightful meditation on the flawed depiction of reality that writing presents. Theroux certainly isn't easy on himself in this scene. He's a "smirking, intrusive, ungenerous, and insincere man" who "makes a reputation out of fooling other people." Jerry convinces himself that Theroux wants to study him, to ferret out his secrets as fodder for one of his pieces.
At the end of the novel, Jerry unravels the mystery of the dead boy and discovers that Merrill isn't exactly the saint he's always imagined. Things are wrapped up tidily (if not a bit hastily), and Jerry returns to the states to write his novel. Although Mr. Delfont may be a "hack" author, his creator, Paul Theroux, certainly knows a thing or two about writing an engaging novel.