Sonali Prasad’s debut novel Glass Bottom sacrifices story for style

In itself, this is a premise teeming with possibilities. In this time of rapid environmental change, climate fiction is a genre that is increasingly gaining currency, even if its practitioners are still finding their way around the scope of the Anthropocene. Prasad has a sense of scale, of how natural disasters leave their imprints on individuals and communities, especially on the lives of women: “The women, meanwhile, trapped by duty to their loved ones… got tangled in grass, metals and bushes; did not seek higher ground if the waves had stripped them naked; and were found gashed, wrapped, strangled, without fingers and toes, clinging to their old and young”. She possesses, too, a journalist’s eye for quirks and details — Prasad’s journalistic work has appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post, among others — the bulldozer that is the answer to “illegal encroachment” when it comes to the poor, the money-power nexus that determinedly keeps its eyes shut for a grand hotel in the same neighbourhood or the violence that invariably strikes women first.

Where Prasad’s writing wavers is in its singular focus on style. Written in an elliptical fashion, interspersed with choral asides and allusions, it often becomes a dense morass of linguistic conceit that distracts rather than draws the reader in. There are sections of beautiful writing that capture the liminal space these characters occupy but they do little to add heft to the narrative or carry the plot forward. One is left with a sense of promise — for Prasad’s novel does give an indication of her talent — and frustration, at the opacity that robs readers of a connection with the characters and their stories. It is a pity for one can sense Prasad’s imaginative heft shimmering below the surface, only just out of reach. Perhaps, this is only first-novel nerves. Indeed, one hopes that Prasad manages to overcome this in subsequent works, allowing her originality to shine through.