Optional Practical Training

Starred review from January 6, 2025
In Sunder’s astute and stimulating debut novel (after the collection Boomtown Girl), an Indian woman reckons with racial prejudice and draconian immigration laws in post-9/11 America. It’s 2006 when Pavitra graduates from college in the U.S., hoping to extend her stay as long as possible. She’s hired to teach math and physics at a Massachusetts private school where she hopes to receive a work visa and buy time to finish her novel, a pursuit considered “frivolous” by her parents and relatives back home in Bangalore. As Pavitra grapples with the weight of her family’s expectations, she realizes that her acquaintances in America also carry preconceived notions about her. For example, her white landlord assumes, for the sake of his own comfort, that she’s a member of the Brahmin caste. In conversations with her friends, Pavitra examines what it means to be perceived as a person of color (“The term ‘of color’ struck me as ridiculous. Only in America, it seemed to me, would people coin such labels as ‘person of color’ and ‘legal alien’ ”) and grapples with other unique aspects of American culture, such as the prizing of “an individual’s opinions.” In a striking climax, Pavitra confronts the limits of what she’s been promised by the school and of her ability to move freely between the U.S. and India, and the novel coheres into a crystalline portrait of a woman straddling cultures and expectations while attempting to discover who she is. It’s a knockout. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co.

March 15, 2025
A recent college graduate from India embarks on her first year as a teacher in the U.S. Pavitra moves from Philadelphia, where she earned her degree, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a private school has agreed to sponsor her visa for a year. While she's certified to teach physics, her passion is creative writing, and she's also drafting her first novel. Over the course of the book, Pavitra has conversations with people of myriad backgrounds and ages: her landlord; her boss; her colleagues; friends from her time growing up in Bangalore to her college years in Pennsylvania; a cousin who visits Boston; a neighbor she dates; other teachers she meets at an education conference; and a more seasoned writer at an artists' retreat. For some reason, these characters pontificate and confide in this young woman. She does little to elicit their engagement. Perhaps that's the point; people talk at her at length--about Indian weddings, food, traffic, weather, caste, yoga, globalization, privilege, colonialism, home and belonging, cultural appropriation, norms, differences, expectations, and so much more--and Pavitra is there to receive it. The novel takes place in 2006, but aside from these soliloquies, the story does little to capture what those post -9/11 years felt like or offer any benefit of hindsight. As a high school teacher, Pavitra spends most of her time with teenagers who aren't that much younger than she is, but author Sunder almost never shows her with them, even as Pavitra's visa hinges on her performance as an educator in a system in which she was not educated. Toward the end of the book, Pavitra is accepted into a competitive artists retreat, though Sundar offers little about her artistic concerns or capabilities, not even a mention of what her writer's statement or work sample might have entailed. Even meeting the book's conceit on its own terms, too often it feels like the author is a ventriloquist using characters to share competing ideas from 20 years ago. Something dramatic finally happens at the end of the book, a big swing to be admired structurally, but one that has nowhere to land. Various monologues that don't quite add up to a plot.

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