Remember your place

Monica Ali is having one of those years that will encourage the fantasies of a million unpublished writers. Several months before her first book was published, Granta magazine included her in this decade's list of the best 20 young authors in England. The appearance of an actual book did nothing to quell that premature enthusiasm. In fact, "Brick Lane" rose to the British bestseller list this summer and on Tuesday was included in the Man Booker Prize shortlist. Its arrival in America looks equally auspicious. But there's a risk of crushing this sensitive novel beneath a press of praise, like inciting a mob to pick fresh raspberries.

British critics have called her the next Zadie Smith, presumably because they're both young, nonwhite females who blasted onto the literary scene with Booker- nominated bestsellers about immigrant culture in London. But Ali displays none of Smith's pyrotechnics or her sprawling scope and scale. Biology aside, a better comparison would be with Anita Brookner, that non-young, blisteringly white matron of British fiction whose quiet incisive novels scrutinize the plight of lonely people.

The genius of "Brick Lane" lies in Ali's ability to make the peculiar universal while making what's familiar comically odd. Though it's a distinctly interior novel, the larger world resonates all along the edges with discordant strains of political and cultural disruption.

The story opens briefly in Bangladesh, where Nazneen enters the world two months early, first refusing to breathe, then refusing to eat. Although her mother laments each of these potentially lethal developments, she insists, "We must not stand in the way of Fate." Growing up, "not once did Nazneen question the logic of the story of How You Were Left to Your Fate. Indeed, she was grateful for her mother's quiet courage, her tearful stoicism that was almost daily in evidence."

That same pained passivity allows Nazneen to endure the family's decision to send her to London as a teenager to marry a 40-year-old stranger named Chanu. She arrives knowing only two English phrases, "sorry" and "thank you," but they serve her well enough, sitting alone all day in their bleak apartment.

Ali handles this frightened girl with a delicate wit that never slips into condescension or tragedy. Nazneen's dreadful situation is buoyed by her baffled observations of Western life. She overhears two white women trading advice about slimming down their dogs. She sees some boys wearing "tracksuits with big check marks on them as if their clothing had been marked by a teacher who valued, above all else, conformity." Ice skating mystifies her.

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