Man is a social animal, i.e. the society around him shapes his character and his behaviour.. When a man finds the environment he resides in, strange, he either moves on to some other befitting environment, or he forces an equilibrium between himself and his surroundings.. But he never accepts a strange surrounding without a study of what makes it so strange.. And that is basically what this book is all about..
Anurag Mathur narrates the story of Gopal, who hails from a small town in Madhya Pradesh, and his one year spent in a university campus in the big bad US..
Armed with lessons from Deep Throat(one can only guess what is so deep in the throat) and Letters to Penthouse as his survival guide to lifestyle in US, Gopal embarks on a journey.. a journey where he not only learns lessons in his university, but also valuable lessons in life...
Anurag Mathur does a commendable job in describing the anguish faced by Gopal upon seeing a culture and lifestyle that is so completely different from that seen in small towns in India.
The story, as expected, revolves around the character of Gopal and thus it defines the story. I personally thought that the characterisation of Gopal was inconsistent.. at some places he is shown to a very naive simpleton, while at others, he is portrayed as a shrewd customer.. Also, the tense that he keeps speaking in tends to get on your nerve at times.. He keeps saying things in a kind of present continuous tense, if you can gather what I mean..
The dilemmas faced by Gopal have been handled and expressed very nicely, in fact, beautifully... Like when he experiences snowfall for the first time in his life, when he compares the American countryside with the dusty Indian country roads.. You can almost experience the same kind of wonder that Gopal must have faced.. The best thing about the novel is that Anurag Mathur manages to bring out the cultural, social and economic differences between India and US realistically and without showing either India or US in bad light..
But what forms the crux of the story, as it would for any of us, is Gopal’s search for his sexual identity.. His friend, whose name would never get past the MS censors, takes up a vow of liberating Gopal from his sexual prison before Gopal goes back to India.. What follows is a multitude of situations that Gopal gets into in order to succeed in this mission of his.
Anurag infuses an amazing sense of humour in this regard, he creates an almost maniacal environment in which Gopal finds himself.. and he describes how Gopal adjusts to this environment and how Gopal becomes more mature in this environment, in a very efficient manner..
However sometimes the humour goes overboard into nonsense.. like the inability of Gopal to understand what one means by ’’Vegetarian cats’’, while he claims to have been lessoned by the two objects of reference I have mentioned above, is questionable..
Also, the ending was horribly handled, almost as if it was written as an afterthought.. And as most good books are let down by their climaxes, so is this one...
Such errors discounting, The Inscrutable Americans is an interesting read, because it succeeds in conveying realistically the dilemmas faced by someone as naive and as shrewd as Gopal...
Not letting any more information out.. Otherwise you might as well read the review!!