The Secret Keeper of Jaipur: A Best Seller

The goal of The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, by Alka Joshi, was clearly to provide a window into India’s complicated politics and culture. Though the novel provided a wealth of information about the area in which the novel took place, I found reading it a slog. Rather than simply dismiss the book & move on, I am writing this review in order to understand the reasons for this.

1) West vs East
The novel is the second in a trilogy and is based on reminiscences of India circa 1969 by Alka Joshi’s mother. The author herself left India at the age of nine and has been entirely educated in the west, which may account for this novel’s oddly pedantic style . She writes as someone looking at India from the outside rather than as someone immersed in the culture. Her book focuses on the material details of Indian life such as interiors, clothing, jewelry, and food, rather than providing insights into how Indians think, feel and relate to each other on a personal level.

2) Excessive Detail
The Secret Keeper shares some similarities with Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, an expat Indian author who, in my view, also crammed far too much information into one novel. He too used relatives’ reminiscences of an earlier time as material and it appeared that he, like Joshi, couldn’t resist putting in every anecdote. However, because Verghese grew up in the rich Indian tradition, rather than in the West, he has a unique and poetic writing style. But his book was far too long.

The Secret Keeper is also too long and full of unnecessary information that slows down the pace and strains the attention span. There are constant digressions and the story bogs down at points of potential interest with detailed descriptions of clothing, jewelry, food, interiors and traditions extraneous to the plot. Joshi’s main goal is clearly not to write a literary novel, but to bring Indian culture in an accessible style to a western audience. But the culture would have been better served by fewer words and better writing.

Because this is the second in the series, Joshi also provides backstories about the characters from the first book, The Henna Artist, that break up the flow. These are not well integrated into the story and are repeated far more often than necessary, so that we hear about Radha’s birth of an illegitimate son, Lakshmi’s affair with a married man and the loss of Nimmi’s husband, over and over again. This novel needed the guidance of a more critical & rigorous editor from the beginning.

3) Cardboard Characters
Though there is extensive detail about everything else, none of the characters come alive and important emotional events are left out or unconvincing. For instance, Malik’s character is inconsistent in that he responds according to context, rather than interior motives we readers are made privy to. First he is in love with Nimmi, then he is lusting after Sheela, then he is devoted to Nimmi again but his motivations for these transitions are not revealed. Malik and Nimmi’s relationship is also sketchy in that there is an abrupt transition from meeting at the flower stall to becoming lovers with no real explanation as to how this came about. There is nothing persuasive in what we are told about both characters to account for their supposedly strong feelings and devotion to each other.

The personal relationships in the novel may be sketchy because the author is not interested in describing inner lives or considers them secondary to describing life in Rajasthan. In the back of her book, Joshi explains that including descriptions of jewelry, garments, food etc., is a way to “…enrich a plot and show character development”. In fact, all these descriptions of “things” took up so much of the book there was little room left for character development and an enriched plot.

4) Tough Act to Follow

The fact that I read The Secret Keeper immediately after a brilliantly-written novel by Michael Cunningham, Day, is largely responsible for my disenchantment. Day‘s characters are vehicles for explorations of the human condition. They are everyday people who transcend everyday life and isn’t that the task of art – to be transcendent? Day is primarily a work of art rather than a slice of life, a page turner, a historical drama or a commercial product.

Of course, not everyone wants to explore the human condition or transcend everyday life. Not everyone wants art and many (most?) readers are happy to pass the time with an undemanding book. In fact, even internet blogs such as this one are criticized for being too demanding. The Flesch reading ease rating for this blog is 47.8, which is considered difficult to read. According to site analysis, I should use shorter sentences and less difficult words. Does this mean that, in a world that demands simple sentences and easy words, it is futile to criticize novels that fall short of their potential? Should we put such a book aside rather than take a writer to task for not trying hard enough – for not struggling, failing, and struggling again to create something better?

Others would argue that literary character development is a remnant from the modernist era when readers expected and demanded 3D characters that come alive through the author’s insight and skill. Cunningham’s characters search for meaning in their lives, which is considered so last century to post-modernists. The Guardian’s review of Day has this to say: “…he returns, with undiminished faith, to the project that united modernists as different as his heroes Joyce and Woolf: the effort to articulate the vast inner lives of a few unexceptional people…”. For instance, Cunningham, a middle-aged gay man, is able to articulate the inner life of five year-old Violet and with a few deft strokes, make her so alive that the reader “knows” Violet. Again from the Guardian: “The liveliest and most memorable portrait is of the little girl, Violet, already a shrewd performer in every moment, dutifully pre-empting the responses of her devoted but exhausted audience….Now here is Violet, twirling in her dress, abundantly cared for. Cunningham allows her to be sad, nonetheless, to feel the weight of a difficult world on her shoulders, and occasionally to turn away from human feelings to animals and stars.” Cunningham clearly studies people and puts effort and skill into making his characters believable. In contrast, Joshi uses Nimmi’s children as stage props and we never get to know Rekha and Chulla. Her characters are tools for introducing descriptions of costumes, traditions, foods, interiors, etc.

5) Writing Style
This is only Joshi’s second novel and hopefully in future she will develop as a novelist, but at this point, there is no innovative use of language and storytelling. Though the plot of The Secret Keeper could have been compelling, the story was fragmented by digressions and backstory repetition. The author’s intention was that by inserting a wealth of information about Indian culture, she would bring it alive in “…all it’s chaotic phantasmagoric glory.” If the writing in the novel had captured this “phantasmagoric glory”, or was richly lyrical and imaginative, or the characters were drawn with more skill and inventiveness, or the sentences had more magic and less pedantry, this novel could have worked. But the writing has none of these and the book was overlong. The Secret Keeper did not bring to life a culture that is ancient, complex, & spiritually rich. Unfortunately for Joshi’s development as an artist, her present style of writing and narrative structure have been a great success, so her readers, publishers and promoters will want more of the same.

6) Issues
In the late 1960’s there were serious socio-political problems plaguing the Indian sub-continent including poverty, famine, wars with China and Pakistan, internal uprisings, political turmoil, and violence in cities. Social mobility and social cohesion were then, and continue to be, hampered by a rigid and punitive caste system and widespread religious intolerance. This has led to the success of communist parties and inevitable clashes with established elites.

Though we should not expect every novel to address it’s socio-political context, The Secret Keeper is written from the point of view of established elites and is uncritical of the system as a whole. There was, and continues to be, discrimination against Muslims and lower-caste groups in Hindu-majority India, but this is glossed over. In The Secret Keeper, it is through the compassion and intervention of those well-connected to aristocratic ruling elites that lower class groups, represented by Malik and Nimmi, are rescued from lives of hardship & poverty. Malik achieves upward mobility with the help of a Brahmin with aristocratic connections and the much abused tribeswoman, Nimmi, is also rescued through the personal intervention of elites. The novel does not challenge the structure of the social system but suggests that all is well if a few “bad apples” (such as gold smugglers) are incarcerated. It’s a naive point of view.

7) No Meritocracy
According to Wikipedia, Joshi’s first book in this trilogy was adopted and promoted by Reese’s Book Club, a celebrity book sales club run by Reese Witherspoon under her media company Hello Sunshine. Today 2.5 million people follow @reesesbookclub. In 2021, Witherspoon sold part of the company to Candle Media, for $900 million. This is big business. A celebrity endorsement has a huge impact on sales and the publishing industry and Reese’s Book Club has gained a reputation for boosting the sales of its Book Club Picks. As of 2019, no Book Club Picks had sold fewer than 10,000 copies and novels selected as Book Club Picks reportedly outsell other fiction books by 700%.

So it is not surprising that the second book in the trilogy, The Secret Keeper is highly rated on Goodreads and became New York Times bestseller. It would seem that reader’s ratings respond to media hype rather than the actual merits of novels as literature. For instance, Day, by Michael Cunningham, who is generally described as a brilliant mind, Pulitzer Prize winner and Creative Writing Prof at Yale, gets only 3.5 stars on Goodreads, while The Secret Keeper gets 4.09.

The question is whether readers who read and highly rate books promoted by celebs would actually prefer books with more literary merit? One reviewer of The Secret Keeper said,”I had happy tears reading it. Almost everyone had a happy ending and the author had tied up all the loose ends.” Another said, “The writing remains soft and simple which is wonderful…”. There is a huge market for novels that are simplistic, unambiguous and have a happy ending. If more complex, nuanced and challenging novels, such as Day, were marketed by celebrity media, would they sell as well? As the CEO of Hello Sunshine says, storytelling can shift the culture and change the world. But story selling can also shift the culture and change the world – perhaps not for the better. What impact is hyper-capitalism having on arts & culture as a whole? This is an interesting area for further study.