Playing Hard to Get

For a book with such a teasing title, it is an oddly unconvincing read

For a book with such a teasing title, it is an oddly unconvincing read
There is this moment in the first chapter of Melanie Abrams8217; first novel Playing. The protagonist, an oddly somnambulistic young woman called Josie, is a postgraduate student in North Carolina, working her way towards exams and possibly a thesis on Ghanaian burial rituals. She also works part-time as nanny at Mary8217;s home. A doctor and single mother of two children, Mary8217;s new love interest is an Indian surgeon, Devesh. He promptly hits on Josie and persuades her to take a walk with him at midnight and, when she laughs at his funny Indian diction, smiles and tells her she ought to be spanked. A little later: 8220;8216;I8217;m going to kiss you,8217; he said. Okay, she thought. Okay.8221;

Uh-oh. The mute unease of this instant seems to spread throughout the beginning of the book. Devesh is a bit pushy and Josie is drawn to him. In no time, she turns up at his house during a rain and soon enough he8217;s giving her chai and singing lines from a Hindi film song. The old smoothie! Immediately, it8217;s obvious why Devesh has moved to the States; an Indian girl would, by now, have yelped and run, screaming. But there8217;s more: Josie and Devesh begin to have sadomasochistic sex during which he beats her up, apparently, a chastisement she longs for.

Their relationship continues for some time, increasingly absorbing and increasingly violent but punctuated with episodes of normality: like, he taking her to see a Bollywood film in a small town. At the intermission, they eat what Abrams persists in calling Samosas, yes, upper case. Meanwhile, the reader is given various hints about Josie8217;s difficult relationship with her mother, and the terrible thing that happened to her when she was four, possibly connected with the synchronous death of her young brother. We also meet Mary and her children, notably Tyler, an autistic boy. But the whole first section of the book, suave old Dr Devesh apart, is weirdly unconvincing: Josie is emotionally numb but, unfortunately, so is Abrams8217; prose. I found myself without interest or belief in the Ghanaian coffins or, indeed, the little boy, not for any intrinsic reason but because even their author, I felt, hardly believed in them. The S038;M is one of the few parts that does seem real, though occasionally written in terms that veer embarrassingly close to those of mass romantic literature.

About halfway through, the novel begins to breathe. A catastrophe forces Josie to return to her childhood home, and the initial trauma that has been continually hinted at is unpacked. Here the writing also improves, though some stylistic quirks remain. The flatness of the writing skates near cliche: one of Devesh8217;s comments strikes Josie 8220;like a punch in the gut8221;. And Abrams sometimes seems so anxious to explain the story and the character to the reader that little room is left for experience or nuance. For a book with such a teasing title, it is an oddly dogmatic read. This is a touching story; I just wish Abrams had allowed herself more elegance, more slowness in telling it.