Remember your place

Her husband, Chanu, is a hysterically boring blowhard, but she endures patiently, noting his silly hypocrisy and hopeless inadequacy without comment. ("If God wanted us to ask questions," she remembers her mother saying, "he would have made us men.") Every evening, while she carefully cuts his corns, Chanu rubs his monumental belly and blathers on about the faded glories of Bangladeshi culture, the "ignorant types" he must endure at work, and the wonders of his ever-expanding collection of diplomas, course certificates, mail-order degrees, and form letters. (In one case, he's framed the directions to Morley College, where he took a night class.)

Chanu has all the makings of a villain or a fool, but Nazneen never sees him that way. The novel's sensibilities are more refined, and in the end this is a story that exercises our compassion. Ali's gentle humor is half satire, half embrace. She wants us to chuckle over what's villainous and foolish about Chanu, but she also wants us to appreciate his affection for Nazneen, to pity his crushed hopes for success, and to understand the exhausting effort of maintaining his blustering facade.

Finally, a financial crisis forces Chanu to allow his wife to make a little money taking in tailoring work. (The more difficult job of managing the tailor, he reminds her, falls to him.) Through this tiny door to the world, Nazneen manages to leave her apartment, join a fledgling group of British Muslims, and fall in love with another man.

Her adultery produces a terrifying burden of guilt, but it also encourages her growing sense of outrage at her mother's passivity and wakens her to the possibility of shaping her fate rather than accepting it.

Harrowing letters from her eternally optimistic sister in Bangladesh develop this heretical notion more. In fractured English, she describes - sometimes without even realizing it - disastrous relationships and experiences that expose the horrors of misogyny back home.

As her white neighbors become more openly xenophobic and her lover grows more radical, Nazneen finds herself in a world of passions - political and personal - as destructive as the repressed world she considers leaving behind. Her salvation comes not by doing what she's told or by choosing from the options of saint or sinner as outlined for her, but by daring to imagine a life outside those boundaries. Ali follows her progress so closely, so sympathetically that it's a moment of real delight when Nazneen finally cries out, "I will say what happens to me. I will be the one."

In the liberated West, of course, we've long known that women have other options: Madame Bovary can choke on poison, Edna Pontellier can walk into the sea, Thelma and Louise can drive off that cliff. How ironic that a young Muslim woman from Bangladesh should find a path that's neither nihilistic nor self-centered.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments about the book section to Ron Charles.

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