A love story gone wrong set on Waiheke Island
The premise of Brannavan Gnanalingam's new novel Slow Down, You’re Here is simple: a portrait of a dead marriage. Kavita feels trapped. Her husband Vishal is emotionally catatonic, and goes through the motions of their life together. She's having a frisson with an old flame, Ashwin. Neither Kavita nor Ashwin quite know what they want from each other. It doesn’t matter, they both need a break from the capitalist machinery that's crushing their weekdays and working life. If nothing, there'll be a holiday in Waiheke, and that may be enough for both. What Vishal thinks or wants, becomes, very quickly, redundant in the scheme of things. But Kavita has kids, and kids need looking after.
However Slow Down is a confusing book. Is it also a study of daily monotony? A commentary on the drudgery of child rearing, and of the superficiality of chasing romantic and sexual connection, and of the horror of survival?
It seems to me that there are a few ways of thinking about Gnanalingam’s latest novel. The first is to think of Slow Down, You’re Here as a novel about seeing: what we see, how we look, how we hope and fear to be seen. Consider these two passages as a mini-study of the book’s main characters:
Kavita looked at Vishal for the first time in that whole conversation. He could see lines and what looked like traces of tears in her eyes, but he couldn't look any further. What he saw scared him, and he didn't want to know whether she hated him at that moment.
[Ashwin] had his back to her, inspecting the room. Kavita needed to do something so she didn’t talk herself out of it. Make up for his shock of seeing her middle-aged body with the shock of seeing her naked body. She lifted her top over her head and unzipped her skirt and dropped them both to the floor. Ashwin turned around and was taken aback by the suddenness of Kavita's movements.
It has to be a book about seeing, because it is also a book about race, and we wear our race on our faces. Ashwin has assimilated into a Pākehā world, adopting its modalities and communicating in its arcane language like a good immigrant. He's an outsider allowed to join a cult but is also a quick study, even though he worries about the undercurrents of what he may be missing out on.
Sanderson was asking if he could get the report by Tuesday.
Ashwin responded. "I'm on leave this week! Sorry, but landlords might need to give some more warning on these points." Before sending it, he did a word search on "Sanderson". No, there was nothing that he'd missed.
"You're on leave? I don't recall approving that ;)" emailed Will.
Was that a joke? Ashwin wondered. He could never tell with Will. What was the wink supposed to mean? Even if it was a joke, was it also serious?
"I can prioritise it when I'm back in next week," he emailed. He needed some certainty. Feelings of guilt would otherwise linger.
He received a response straight after. "GTL would be a great long-term client. They've got a big property portfolio and Auckland landlords have only just started catching up on seismic checks. Or at least their tenants have."
Just ask me to work, Ashwin thought. Just fucking ask me. None of these mind games.
What the Pākehā Waiheke landlord might see in Kavita and Ashwin is one brown woman and a brown man, but there are unspoken, unacknowledged differences between the two of them. Each seems to think the other better than themselves. Kavita sees herself as inferior to the kind of women Ashwin can date, and Ashwin reflects on how hard it is to date as a brown man in Aotearoa.
Ashwin has the financial power to sponsor a week in Waiheke, and Kavita can supply the sex and the conversation
The relationship feels off. Each is kept off-balance, never quite coming together in an authentic, or vulnerable moment. Perhaps that's typical of the uncertainty and secret nihilism with which we chase love. Which is why it's confusing and a little melancholy how readily Ashwin calls it love, though he has no indication if it's reciprocated.
Ashwin has the financial power to sponsor a week in Waiheke, and Kavita can supply the sex and the conversation, but the slow pace of their idyll in Waiheke masks the tilting see-saw of power.
"No that's perfect," Ashwin said in response.
When he hung up, he could see Kavita chuckling.
"What?"
"Your posh telephone accent. Very BBC."
Ashwin felt defensive. "Everyone does it!"
"I know, of course we all do. But it's funny. Yours is sooo different. I can't wait to hear you on the phone to your parents. It'll be a complete 180.”
Predictably, Ashwin doesn’t take this well, even if he's too well-mannered to say it. Kavita essentially calls him out on a duplicity, a duplicity aspiring good immigrants hope is unnoticeable, seamless. He believes that since he wears whiteness as an invisibility cloak, that he passes for exactly that, a white person. He has all the markers of one who has assimilated well. Kavita thinks of him as rich, and successful; a brown man who mostly dates white women. She is self-conscious about her body because she fears his judgment.
The novel starts with an uncomfortable encounter between a taxi driver and his drunk passenger. The scene simmers with unspoken violence and racism
It’s tempting to read the characters inability to actually, properly look at each other as a telling symptom of their self-absorption but Slow Down is also a very lonely book. I don't know how much the pandemic lockdowns seeped into the writing of this novel, but the universe of this book is deeply claustrophobic.
Perhaps it makes sense that Gnanalingam initially conceived of this book as a film script. The novel starts memorably with an uncomfortable encounter between a taxi driver and his drunk passenger. The scene simmers with unspoken violence and racism. The balance of power in this first chapter is balanced on a razor’s edge, and sets the pitch of the book early on. Whether it's the stinking inside of a soiled cab, an unhappy home, or a Waiheke rental, the novel locks in its characters. It's all the more emphasised in the domestic horror aspects of the book –– not only the eventual isolation of the children, but the utter insularity of each character’s inner world.
I have other issues with Slow Down, You’re Here. A little less dwelling on the drudgery of the failing marriage could have helped the pace. A little more insight into Vishal, and his atypical lack of ambition (for a south Asian immigrant) would have been interesting.
But at heart, Slow Down is a novel about class, about loneliness, and about the ways we see or don’t see each other. It's also a deeply melancholy book –– not only because of the eventual horror that befalls its most vulnerable characters, but because its slowness masks an inexorable march towards a known tragedy. We know where we are headed, we know what awaits us at the end of the book, but we are forced to while away our time in Waiheke, worrying about money, about class, and real estate, the desirability of our bodies, the sum totals of our sexual encounters, while something terrible awaits us at journeys end. Perhaps that’s the point the author wanted to make after all.
Slow Down, You're Here by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson, $25) is available in bookstores nationwide.
