Seven Oaks Magazine.

It is a most rare event when a book, any book, generates the kind of hype and publicity that Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani has in the last year. After a heavy splash at the Frankfurt book fair, the manuscript sparked off a bidding war among London’s publishing elite, landing the first-time novelist and Financial Times editor a reported six-figure advance. The publicity campaign that followed was comparable to release of a major film: the London Underground was inundated with stickers and posters of the imprint of a large, pink tiger, with the command “Read Londonstani.” Breathless critics raved about the book’s “compelling” look at a community bubbling away underneath the calm, ancient façade of the London landscape. Malkani was hailed as the “Muslim Irvine Welsh,” an eyebrow-cocking proclamation, given he is a Punjabi Hindu. A miasma of whisperings of another possible Zadie Smith/Monica Ali began to hang over the reading public. The hype machine entered into its highest gear.

Such hype, be it for books, film or whatever else people buy and PR firms can promote, is by its very nature dubious, something that becomes about itself and less about the very thing it is promoting. Planning Malkani’s coronation into the ranks of serious immigrant writers, based essentially on buzz and journalistic one-upmanship, is one thing – but what of the book itself? Critics are tripping over themselves to declare The Next Big Thing, but does it have more to do with empty king-making than proper consideration for the book? It should be remembered that ethnic minority writers have been the darlings of the English publishing world, and not without justification. It was a mere six years ago that Zadie Smith turned the reading world on its ear with White Teeth, and Monica Ali wrote about Brick Lane only three years after that. Hype is one thing, but the need for the hip scoop may account for the quick, near unanimous agreement among critics. Which brings us back to the question: what of the book itself?

On the surface, the first novel by a young, second-generation South Asian from Hounslow, with Oxbridge credentials and a successful career in journalism, has all the makings of a careful, nuanced, intelligent consideration of immigrant communities in a major Western city. It reminded me of a bitter joke a friend made of the irony of London winning the 2012 Summer Games, considering the events of the first part of this decade: “Finally, a Muslim city will host the Olympics.”

Finally, a South Asian writer will have a book in wide release that isn’t about marriage, strict parents, food, and mindless culture clash. With the recent liquid bomb terrorist plot in London, the book might even find a resonance with a proper examination of second-generation immigrant communities living in adopted Western countries.

I’ll admit, I was hoping for the White Teeth-sort of lightening in a bottle, something that would justify the sheer volume of attention the book had received. It was with great anticipation I picked up my copy, coincidentally a mere two days before I was to travel by airplane, restricted to carry no liquids of any kind. My carry on may not have had a tube of toothpaste, but Malkani’s hot pink book set off no alarms.

The book opens with a kick in the face. Hardjit is beating down a gora (a white person or white trash, depending on the inflection) kid for calling him a Paki. Hardjit is a young Sikh living in the London borough of Houslow. He has added the “d” to his name to suggest toughness, an imitation of the black gangsta culture he and his gang of street toughs practice. “Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck’d, shudn’t b callin me a Paki, innit.”

The beating, and the book, is narrated by Jas, a newly accepted member of Hardjit’s crew. Jas is tarnished, fallen from grace, the smart kid who was interested in books, history, school and grades, but has now gotten into the wrong crowd. This past lingers in the narrator, as every experience Jas has with his new friends – from cell phone scams, rolling in Ravi’s tricked out BMW, hanging out in Hardjit’s bedroom, gawking at women, to moving on to bigger scams, witnessing fights, and falling for a girl – is recounted in grave, long-winded, excruciating detail. Jas is interested in deconstructing and perfecting the “rudeboy” ethos, which means adopting and employing a new sort of language.

This language, and the way Londonstani is written, has been the centre of much discussion. The mix of English hooliganisms and urban Black American hip hop thuggery, bedizened with Punjabi slangs, curses and words, might be cutting edge, stylish street poetry to some. I found it excruciating reading, turning already questionable dialogue into a gaudy, bloated, clunky, exasperating mess. It is clear that Malkani is trying to invoke a new language by creating Droogs for a 21st century Clockwork Orange, or the disenchanted youth for a South Asian Trainspotting, but it fails miserably. I was often struck incredulous that such schlock not only found a publisher, but admiration.

It seems Malkani has successfully pulled the wool over a lot of eyes, convincing the right people he has his fingers on the pulse of a rumbling London subculture. All he’s done is draw up caricatures, and bad ones at that. No one, and I say this as a second-generation, fluent-in-Punjabi Sikh, talks like the balloons in Londonstani.

Nor is anyone like the characters in the book. Malkani does away with the niceties of nuance and accuracy to get on with the business of depicting South Asian people as either religious zealots, sellout coconuts (brown on the outside, white on the inside), mindless slaves to tradition, racists, materialists, violent thugs and pretty much any label readily available to anyone who has skimmed a superficial news story about Indo-communities in the last twenty years. None of this, in itself, would necessarily make a bad book, if the author had gone about his business with more aplomb. In Malkani’s world, a coconut is identified easily by a Coldplay album in the backseat of a car, an empty traditionalist by a shrill, implausibly difficult mother, and a thug by the laughable dialogue he crowbars into his mouth.

So rigid and simplified are these stereotypes – and that is what Malkani indulges in, empty stereotype – that reading them is akin to watching paint dry: it is what it is, and no strained, repetitive prose will make it anything else.

After teaching the offending gora a lesson, Hardjit, Jas and the crew ready themselves for a rumble at a former BMX track. Hardjit has taken it upon himself to defend the honour of a Punjabi girl, who has been offended by Tariq, a Pakistani Muslim. Described in the exaggerated, fanciful language of someone who has never seen, much less been in a fight, the crowd is soon broken up by local police, and Hardjit and his crew are rescued by their former high school history teacher. Mr. Ashwood, an idealist, and a Marxist, hustles them into his simple office, and discusses their situation and responsibilities as second-generation immigrants in perhaps the book’s most interesting passages, and then takes it upon himself to set the boys straight, hooking them up with his former star student Sanjay, a South Asian now living the highlife as a banker. Mr. Ashwood is never heard of again, thus disposing the book of its only interesting character.

What follows is a series of most implausible events, where the boys sink into quagmires, involving even more ridiculous cell phone scams, family dramas, and forbidden love. Throughout the book, the author is clearly out of his element. Whether describing family drama, economics (“bling” or conventional) or the tough posturing of a gangster, there is a sense of an overactive but completely naïve imagination at work. Malkani often retreats to the “authenticity” of his painful, expository dialogue, or to invoking and magnifying offensive stereotypes or, in the book’s most terrible narrative device, to suggesting the nature of a character by making him watch a particular DVD or listen to a specific CD. For example, towards the end of Londonstani, the reader is supposed to experience dread because a character Jas confronts is watching a Sopranos DVD. Watching, mind you. What the character actually does, and comes across as, is no more dangerous then a mound of whipped cream.

In writing this review, I was struck with the notion that it might be unfair to burden Malkani with responsibility of representing his entire community. It is unfair to place such an expectation on anyone. The most that can be expected from a writer, from a novel, from any writer or novel, is one story, set in a particular time and place. That an “ethnic” writer must capture all of their community’s experience is a burdensome expectation, and one not placed on writers without a label. The task not only leans towards the impossible, but by necessity reduces the evocation of broad, ultimately meaningless generalities.

But it is Malkani who places the burden on himself, or appears to when writing Londonstani, and falls into this trap willingly. The book sold itself by banging the authenticity drum, by the suggestion that these monstrous characters and these ludicrous events are typical. It is at its best offensive, at its worst nihilistic, and in the end unforgivable, because it does not even bother with an interesting story. In this way, the book is a failure, a bad cartoon sprung from the imagination of an opportunist.