Migratory Hearts

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'The Newlyweds,' by Nell Freudenberger

By MOHSIN HAMID

Published: April 26, 2012

At the end of Nell Freudenberger's second novel, "The Newlyweds," we encounter the following sentence: "I believe that it is only by sharing our stories that we truly become one community."

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Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times

Nell Freudenberger

THE NEWLYWEDS

By Nell Freudenberger

337 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

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Illustration by Christopher Brand

A worthy objective, surely. Nonetheless we're on tricky ground here, and a little probing on our part is called for. The sentence quoted above is in fact part of a Starbucks "Reach for the Stars" writing competition entry attributed to the novel's protagonist, Amina, a Bangladeshi woman who has immigrated to America. But Amina's entry, it turns out, was not actually written by Amina. It was written, and submitted, by Kim, an American cousin of Amina's American husband, George. Kim is a yoga instructor. She is a storyteller, a bit of a liar. Like Freudenberger herself, she has spent time in South Asia. And Kim is held up, at least partly, as a stand-in for the author:

" 'But you always wear Indian clothes,' Amina said.

"Kim laughed. 'I wear my own version. This kind of thing.' She indicated the bulky sweater she was wearing over an unseasonable cotton dress and a pair of black tights. 'But trust me — I look stupid in a sari.' "

Freudenberger is aware of the pitfalls she faces in telling us Amina's tale, and she wants us to be aware of them too. If Kim has invented a competition-­winning story as Amina, about Amina, without Amina's permission, and with various inaccuracies, what, Freudenberger invites us to ask, has Freudenberger done?

At stake here isn't — or shouldn't be — the question of authenticity, which is a red herring: nationalities, ethnicities, genders and even species do not "own" the right to fictional narratives spoken in what purport to be their voices. Such a proposition, taken to its logical extreme, would reduce fiction to autobiography, and while fiction may well be alive and kicking in the belly of many an auto­biography, to confine fiction solely to that domain would be madness.

No, the more pressing issue is that of verisimilitude, truthlikeness, the illusion of being real, a quality without which fiction that adheres to the conventions of what is commonly called realism (a problematic term, but useful shorthand for the more cumbersome "let's try not to draw attention to the fact that this is all made up"-ism) starts to feel to its audience like an ill-fitting and spasmodic sock puppet.

For despite the subversive wink embodied in Kim — her name of course brings to mind a certain Kipling character who could blend in with the natives but risked occasionally getting caught — the experience of reading "The Newlyweds" remains substantially the experience of reading a work in the realist vein. This is a third-­person account that hews closely to Amina's point of view. Truthlikeness is thus important to its ambitions.

And Freudenberger brings impressive attributes to bear in her attempt to achieve it: a powerful sense of empathy, of being able to imagine what it is to be someone else, to feel what someone else feels; an effective but unfussy writing style that avoids drawing attention to itself; and an international sensibility, which allows her to write about places outside America not as peripheral — mere playgrounds for American characters — but as central to themselves.

The novel begins with Amina recently settled in Rochester, checking for her green card in her new mailbox — new, as George says, because of: "Thugs. Potheads. Smoking weed and destroying private property." This vandalism is no directed, racist attack, but a continuing, community­wide problem, one of many symptoms revealing an America where things aren't as good as they used to be.

But the past hasn't exactly been wonderful either, not for Amina, and not for George, as may go without saying for a couple who meet online across continents through AsianEuro.com and agree, with barely any physical interaction — and despite obvious differences in nationality, culture and religious upbringing — to wed.

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Mohsin Hamid is the author of "Moth Smoke" and "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." His third novel will be published next spring.

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