Diasporic South Asians appear in much of my work, and my experience pervades all of it. But I suspect that many of the few who read me wonder where my identity is, my struggles with belonging, ethnicity, and dislocation. That’s why I can’t ever be completely lighthearted about currybooks: they teach us to predict the contents of what we are about to read, and they prescribe the limits of what we are – of what I am – supposed to publish.
While my decision to write thrillers under the pseudonym I made up when I was fourteen – basing the last name on Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien and the first on the simplest WASP analogue of my name – came from my desire to write crime and horror fiction alongside my literary fiction, to have two simultaneous careers like Iain Banks or John Banville, I knew the audience could see it another way. They could interpret me as trading one genre for another, avoiding the currybooks that would come ‘naturally’ to me by assuming an identity that I could write anything from – a white identity. Thrillers, at least the kind that I want to continue writing, offer something wonderful to writers: you’re supposed to defy the conventions that you flirt with; you’re supposed to endlessly surprise the reader, to lead them into the unfamiliar. This, of course, is something that can be said of high literary novels, as well – they’re meant to initiate us into an experience of the unfamiliar, or a different experience of something we believe we’ve felt or done before. I have confidence that the readers of my thriller fiction want unfamiliarity from me, and that gives me great pleasure.
Pseudonymous writers like Stephen King (Richard Bachman), Donald E. Westlake (Richard Stark), John Banville (Benjamin Black), and Julian Barnes (Dan Kavanagh) used their other names for various reasons: King to publish at the rate he was writing, and to test whether he could still sell under another name; Banville to indicate to his following of literary readers that his detective fiction was a different thing altogether, and also to create another persona, one who could write much faster than his literary self. I feel the same as he does about the actual creative process, though he’s more willing to credit the mystical. As he wrote in the Guardian: ‘When I stand up from my writing desk, “John Banville,” or “Benjamin Black” – that is, the one whose name will appear on the title page – vanishes on the instant, since he only existed while the writing was being done.’ Banville has his Booker Prize– winning, high-lit reputation to think of, and escape from, when he’s writing as Black. Am I escaping the expectations of what a brown writer is supposed to make when I write as Ripley? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it, but I’d also be lying if I said it ever occurred to me when I was actually writing. And I know that while my pseudonym can vanish when I stand up from my laptop, my racial and cultural identity will never separate themselves from the name Naben Ruthnum on any title page or cover that I have the fortune to arrive at: not to an audience and a business that retains a fixation on the writer’s identity, on how it lends gravity to the story that is being told in the pages to follow.
A couple of years after standing up from the desk (actually a small TV table in my Vancouver bedroom) where I wrote ‘Cinema Rex,’ I found agents who liked all of what I did. We sold the thriller I’d written to an American publisher. (‘Cinema Rex’ had attracted as much notice as a short story in a Canadian literary journal can be expected to draw in the States.) After that novel sold, I had to acknowledge that it was possible I’d imagined industry disinterest in the work I’d done that strayed from the field of brown nostalgia, that I was being prematurely bitter, or that much of my other writing didn’t measure up to whatever promise people saw in ‘Cinema Rex.’ I kept having stories published, with certain editors and magazines clearly not caring what I was writing about, as long as the pieces were good. Writing that story had made me better at writing whatever came next – in a true currybook narrative, this would be thanks to me finally writing about my heritage, to discovering what made my voice worth hearing. But that’s not it – once you’ve written something you truly believe is good, you keep working to match and exceed it, not to recreate its reception or the formal elements that went into it. The story’s value to me was its quality, not its setting.
When I discussed my career anxieties with a writer friend a couple years back, he faked together portions of a nightmare essay that pinpointed my fears of what people would think of my pen-name decision:
Like much of Ruthnum’s writing, his thriller deals with a man’s conflicting inner and outer lives, where the protagonist spends most of his time fretting the veil is going to be lifted. (The reason most of Ruthnum’s work is so often redolent of the pulp style is because its built-in requirement for duplicity allows him to explore his identity issues while masked in tradition.) The purpose of Ruthnum’s employment of ‘Ripley’ as the author of this latest novel (which is larger in scope and scale than ‘Cinema Rex’) is twofold. One is to efface Ruthnum’s identity, CV, and previous publications (including ‘Rex’) as a whole, and two is to supersede that work with one that is more true to who Naben/Nathan really is.
A large portion of the ‘Cinema Rex’ novel exists – enough that I could complete some version of it, could give it a shot on the market. I can’t honestly say it would be good, though. Trigger-shyness started to overwhelm me as I moved deeper into writing it, realizing with some horror that I might be guilty of nostalgia – not for a lost homeland that I never knew, but for a story I’d already told. I couldn’t risk making this novel what readers saw from me first. I would never be able to believe that it was published because of the book it was, and not the nostalgia-and-authenticity genre trip that it was capable of delivering once it left my laptop and reached eyes that aren’t my own. The only way I could be absolutely sure I wasn’t starting with a currybook was by starting with this, a book called Curry, which in so many ways plays by the genre rules. It has recipes, memories of my mother and father, a trip to an exotic country of origin, infinite mangoes, alienation and dislocation, and even a realization: that I fear this genre because I fear internalizing the outside pressure to create and enjoy the story that you want to read.
The associations that come with the South Asian Writer designation – the tropes that make us easy to group together on a table with a sign reading Subcontinental Sojourn in a big-box bookstore – are the recurring narrative patterns I’ve always tried to avoid. Categorization – the same industry- and consumer-focused drive that allowed Indian restaurants and the late-twentieth-century variation on the eternally changeable curry to thrive – has a role in the stratification of the South Asian immigrant novel, in the delimiting of what these books can be. Particularity doesn’t market as easily as familiarity: hence the drive for a South Asian experience that can be defined, replicated, and sold as a comfortable reflection of lived experience. What’s lost? Thanks to writers from V. S. Naipaul to Jade Sharma, who ignore the exigencies of categorization and the smoother path to publication that it offers, perhaps very little. Stories of particularity, of individual experience emerging from an undefined South Asian experience, continue to emerge.
But there must be other stories that are lost, or go unread, because of the dominance of the story we’ve heard before.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Rudrapriya Rathore, whose comments and conversation were crucial to the idea behind this book and the shape it eventually took.
To Emily Keeler, whose steady direction across the strange way we decided to compose this thing made it happen. And Alana Wilcox, Norman Nehmetallah, and Jessica Rattray of Coach House, who continue to push it onward.
To my reading family: Mandy, Kay, Sam, and Rouba Ruthnum, for teaching me the value in doing this at all.
My incomparable agents, Samantha Haywood and Stephanie Sinclair.
To Haley Cullingham and Miranda Hickman for teaching me how to write outside of fiction.
To Ian Worang, Daniel Reid, Leigh Doyle, Justin Reed, and Chris Hogg, for the backup I needed to get this project done.
And: Kris Bert
in, Rob Inch, Buddy, Graeme Desrosiers, Aaron Peck, Michael LaPointe, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Haldane, Brad Iles, Mike Barrow, Kevin Keegan, Julia Cooper, Dan Moxon, Jon Bunyan, Ben Barootes, Gorrman Lee, Kate Zagorskis, Christopher Dingwall, David Bertrand, Charlotte Dykes, Kelli Korducki, Ashley MacCuish, Andrew Forbes, Carmine Starnino, Miranda Hill, Mark Medley, Russell Wangersky, Terence Young, Valerie Compton, Gabriella Goliger, Ben McGinnis, Kevin Chong, Jordan Christianson, Cody Hicks, Deborah Hemming, Joel Deshaye, Robin Feenstra, Ariel Buckley, Ian Whittington, Justin Pfefferle, Amanda Clarke, Paula Derdiger, Michelle Ledonne, Adèle Barclay, and Alicia Merchant.
About the Author
Naben Ruthnum won the Journey Prize for his short fiction, has been a National Post books columnist, and has written books and cultural criticism for the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and the Walrus. His crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Joyland, and his pseudonym Nathan Ripley’s first thriller, Find You In The Dark, will appear in 2018. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.
About the Exploded Views Series
Exploded Views is a series of probing, provocative essays that offer surprising perspectives on the most intriguing cultural issues and figures of our day. Longer than a typical magazine article but shorter than a full-length book, these are punchy salvos written by some of North America’s most lyrical journalists and critics. Spanning a variety of forms and genres – history, biography, polemic, commentary – and published simultaneously in all digital formats and handsome, collectible print editions, this is literary reportage that at once investigates, illuminates and intervenes.
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