Hardev, springing from an older, less self-conscious generation, is the novel’s finest creation, a sympathetically pompous father fighting the breakdown of his body and the encroachment of a hideous subdivision. This is especially true when she takes the characters out of their comfort zones, as when Emile begins to suspect that he may have non-platonic feelings for Mohab. Uppal achieves some fine comic effects in her interlocking narratives and identity conflicts. This ideological orthodoxy contributes to both the novel’s strengths and weaknesses. Uppal, like Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru, and Jonathan Lethem, is striving to make a Big Statement about how culture and ideologies both construct and deconstruct self, and how any deviations from cultural studies graduate seminar ideals will not be tolerated. That this list of characters reads a little like the ideal roll call for a banquet celebrating contemporary Canada’s rich mix of polyglot identities is most likely intentional. The novel is filled out with a number of secondary characters, including Mohab, Emile’s devout Muslim friend, who may or may not be a closeted homosexual Hardev’s homecare worker Rodriguez and Kite, Dorothy’s co-conspirator in a plan to build a massive collage (eventually titled “To Whom It May Concern”) charting their fellow students’ transient, fluctuating identities. Unknown to his family, he is about to lose his home to the bank unless he can find a way to earn enough money to pay off his back mortgage payments. Hardev is anxious about more than just his weakening health and his failure to deliver on the ideal of family life that he’d promised himself as a young man starting a new life in Canada. Isobel has skipped the dinner, as has Dorothy, the couple’s 17-year-old daughter, a precocious deaf student and artist who works part-time in a tattoo parlour. Present at the table are Emile and Birenda, Hardev’s oldest daughter, and her rich fiancé Victor, who is meeting Hardev for the first time. Long separated from his French-Canadian wife Isobel, Hardev shares the family’s original suburban Ottawa home with his son Emile.Īs the novel opens, Hardev is watching his fully acculturated adult children listlessly go through the motions of a Thanksgiving dinner. The aging patriarch, an Indian immigrant named Hardev, is an engineer confined to a wheelchair since an accident left him almost completely paralyzed from the neck down. Poet, novelist, and academic Priscila Uppal is the latest author to wade into the waters of identity politics with her second novel, To Whom It May Concern, the saga of the splintered Dange family. What does it mean to be an individual in a society uprooted from the certainties of family and ethnic tradition, objective morality, and religious belief? How much of what we call our fixed “self” is merely a collage of competing cultural signs, family dynamics, biology, and personal tastes? The task of defining, even in the broadest terms, the protean postmodern self has bedevilled artists for decades.
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