eBook, 312 pages
English language
Published 2022 by Viking.
From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself—a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America
Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women—soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach.
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with …
From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself—a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America
Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women—soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach.
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.
A beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose, All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world.
Books like this give me hope. That it’s possible to talk about being a queer, (South) Asian immigrant without retreading the same self-pitying tropes. That stories POC tell and share can show all our messiness as we try to figure out how to treat each other and be in the world. That nuance, community care, and sex can all be part of it. The best ending to an opening chapter ever.
Blend of other and the familiar, good without tipping great, the flat at the end couldn’t detract from my bitter joy.
[a:Sarah Thankam Mathews|18647970|Sarah Thankam Mathews|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1678202915p2/18647970.jpg]'s first novel, [b:All This Could Be Different|59627478|All This Could Be Different|Sarah Thankam Mathews|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1661517709l/59627478.SY75.jpg|88378302], might as well be a work of science fiction to me. I mean this as a high compliment. It's largely about people in their twenties who live in Milwaukee around 2013 and their efforts at sorting out who they are.
The narrator is so unsure of who she is she can't stand hearing others use her first name. Despite how unrelated their lives are to mine—an East Coast white guy in his mid-60s —there were flashes of things that were so similar to my own experience that they more than closed any distance between the characters and me. The crappy building manager, the awful boss, cars that don't work, lost apartment keys, a bad job market, hangovers, dental worries, running out of money, mild food insecurity, complicated relationships.
Not that …
[a:Sarah Thankam Mathews|18647970|Sarah Thankam Mathews|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1678202915p2/18647970.jpg]'s first novel, [b:All This Could Be Different|59627478|All This Could Be Different|Sarah Thankam Mathews|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1661517709l/59627478.SY75.jpg|88378302], might as well be a work of science fiction to me. I mean this as a high compliment. It's largely about people in their twenties who live in Milwaukee around 2013 and their efforts at sorting out who they are.
The narrator is so unsure of who she is she can't stand hearing others use her first name. Despite how unrelated their lives are to mine—an East Coast white guy in his mid-60s —there were flashes of things that were so similar to my own experience that they more than closed any distance between the characters and me. The crappy building manager, the awful boss, cars that don't work, lost apartment keys, a bad job market, hangovers, dental worries, running out of money, mild food insecurity, complicated relationships.
Not that it was all bad for me or for this novel's protagonist. A few days ago I saw a [a:Fran Lebowitz|8127311|Fran Lebowitz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1536147926p2/8127311.jpg] quote in which she said if you didn't have fun when you were in your twenties you never will. The people in All This Could Be Different do have fun.
As much as it's about what I mentioned above, it's also a story of immigration, in this case from India. The main character is a twenty-three-year-old woman originally from there.
There are some steamy passages in it, the kind I don't see in books by men these days, and that makes sense. The kind of sex straight sex men describe is abundant online and descriptions of it are uninteresting to most readers. About half the main characters in All This Could Be Different are lesbians, and the proper depiction of that kind of sex doesn't often make it into mainstream books.
Mathew writes wonderfully. There was at least one phrase on every page that astonished me.
Excerpt:
From Tig I learned that Thom was doing poorly. He had been taking his feelings out on Isabel, and Isabel, who knew her worth in the larger scheme of the world, had tearfully demanded a relationship break and had a friend drive her home to Minnesota. In the wake of this, and at Tig's urging, he had been to see a psychiatrist. This person gave him pills to make him less desperate and sad, to still the eddies of panic that pulled him into their vortices. So far he'd scored one interview with a company that sold paper goods. They gave the gig, an entry-level position, to somebody with seven years of experience. Four hundred people had applied.
