Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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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. Pa is outwardly positive, but Gopi reads his “eyes and body”: “He was telling us that in one day we had exposed him, left him behind, left him wide open to whatever was coming for him. I had the feeling that spoken language had become a wall for the girls, an obstacle to knowing and being known. The narrative of ‘Western Lane’ revolves around the life of an 11-year-old girl named Gopi and her intricate relationships within her family. The tension is heightened by squash-obsessed, emotionally uncommunicative Pa; fearful Aunt Ranjan is the obstacle that stands in Gopi’s way.

Just as important to the novel, and just as vivid, is the almost inexpressible experience of a human body negotiating a transparent box, the heightened awareness that “Jahangir had for a situation, his sense for what was going on behind him”. 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. There is a love interest, Ged, whose mother intervenes at just the right moment for the plot (and the wrong moment for Gopi). Whenever she felt adrift during her writing, she would revisit that opening page, which she considered a steadfast anchor for her creative orientation. After their increasingly strenuous training sessions, he and Gopi spend hours watching videos of the legendary athlete Jahangir Kahn and his rivals Geoff Hunt and Hiddy Jahan.When she's on the court, she feels more connected to her father and connects with Ged, who also excels playing squash. I don’t know what makes these books endure in my mind, but maybe in part it is the feeling of having genuinely encountered the private world of another person, a sensibility – the narrator’s or the author’s, perhaps both. There was also something about the squash court itself, about the simple white box: it’s such a surreal, unfamiliar place, and in part because of the unfamiliarity it’s a place where time seems suspended and the outside world can be forgotten.

To my left is a wardrobe, to my right above my desk the exhibition poster from the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Tove Jansson retrospective, showing Moomintroll standing in an open window looking out into the dark. Recently a friend asked me if the book has something of the detective story about it, with Gopi trying to find her way, piecing together the clues of small gestures, actions and fragments of overheard conversations; she has little to go on and since she’s dealing with the mysteries of loss, there are no answers for her. Given the familiar storyline presented, The Guardian's Caleb Klaces noted that readers "might expect Western Lane to feel formulaic, but it doesn’t. This challenge was particularly pronounced when she had to switch between the perspective of the child and the retrospective narrator. 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.Soon Gopi discovers a talent that draws the attention of Ged, the son of the club’s white manager, who becomes her training partner; and Maqsud, a Pakistani businessman and avid squash player who convinces Pa to enter his daughter into a tournament. Gopi is attracted to Ged’s stammer because “it seemed like you were drifting close to him in the silence”. 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. At the start of Chetna Maroo’s polished and disciplined debut, Gopi, an 11-year-old Jain girl who has just lost her mother, stands on a squash court outside London. It started with the feeling of being inside a squash court, with a voice saying, ‘There were three of us.

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”. 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’.

She mentioned that as she delved into these narratives and explored other novels, she encountered the challenge of maintaining a consistent narrative voice. 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. I didn’t have a plot or outline for the whole novel, but I had a sense that the story would turn on this one question: would Pa bring himself to let one of his daughters go? Maroo has a talent for making the space she needs for emotional complexity by way of physical description. 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.