Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Problems by Jade Sharma review / Strangely uplifting

BOOK OF THE DAY

Problems by Jade Sharma review – strangely uplifting

A young junkie parades her life of deceit in this frank and sharp debut

Hannah Jane Parkinson
Mon 21 May 2018 07.00 BST

had concerns with the cover of Problems. That title, screamed in fuchsia all-caps on a vaguely urban, desolate background… it comes off a little “awkward YA novel”, with characters probably called Trent, or Lexxxi. You know how it is. A sort of millennial Melvin Burgess, but not nearly as good. The PR blurb says that this is an “edgy” book, clearly unaware that if someone described a party as “edgy” you would immediately choose not to go.

I needn’t have worried. Problems, the debut of Indian-American writer Jade Sharma, is wonderful. Our narrator is Maya, a young New Yorker, who works part-time in a bookshop while ostensibly writing her MA thesis and who is married to a nice (read: boring) guy called Peter. Maya is having two ill-advised affairs: one with her former college professor, Ogden, the other with heroin. (Note: Problems refers to heroin as dope, as it’s known in the US, whereas in the UK dope denotes marijuana.)

Jade Sharma: ‘perfectly crafted one-liners and succinct observations’.
Photograph: Tracie Williams

Maya, who tells her story mostly in the first person but occasionally the second, is both faultlessly honest and consistently deceitful. She lies, but tells us: “I lie all the time.” At the beginning, Maya explains that she avoids becoming a junkie by never doing heroin on three consecutive days. And yet there she is, day three, sweating, sending faux-casual texts to her dealer about when he’s coming. It’s not that Maya is malevolent; it’s that being a liar is part of the job description of being an addict. And also that, yeah, sometimes it’s just better to say your dad is alive to avoid questions about why he isn’t. But at the same time, a big part of this novel’s power is its injection of frankness.

There’s the sex, in particular. Don’t recommend Problems to your parents, or to your children, unless you’re one of those weird families who practise pelvic floor exercises together after dinner. The sex is unflinching. The sex is often like this: “He fucked me from behind. Felt like a baseball mitt, stretching.” And here’s the thing: the sex is often simultaneously feminist and unfeminist, the precise erotic dilemma of a generation that has grown up with freely available, and free, porn. Even the description of a woman having sex is still a feminist act. (Workshopping her novel, Sharma has said she felt her fellow writers’ reactions to her sex scenes would have been different had she been a man.) But Maya, in particular, likes “a kind of ruining. I liked it hard.” How does a whole generation of women square their fight against, say, the gender pay gap with the sort of stuff they are routinely expected to do in the bedroom, and… what if they like that? Even when Maya starts turning tricks to fund her habit, she doesn’t hate it.

It’s often been the case that male protagonists are allowed to be whatever, while female protagonists must be likable. Maya isn’t likable, in the way that a good friend going through a shitty time and refusing to help themselves isn’t likable, but she is smart, can be caring, and is deeply funny. Sharma’s background is in slam poetry and it shows. Problems is filled with sharp dialogue, perfectly crafted one-liners and succinct observations – especially about relationships (Sharma has admitted to taping her conversations with her former boyfriend). Here’s Maya on Peter:

“I watched Peter stand in front of a mirror and put his sunglasses on different points of his nose for 15 minutes and I thought: This is the person I am spending the rest of my life with.”

There is what psychologists would call a dissonance in our narrator’s psyche (“I wanted to be touched. I was pretty sure I would puke if anyone touched me”). She’s still working out who she is and what she wants; whether she hates her ill mother or loves her; whether she wants Peter or not; whether she cares or doesn’t that she’s not a skinny white woman. But there isn’t a single inch of extra flesh to Sharma’s prose. In a slim book, in which the paragraphs are short enough not to need chapter breaks, Sharma either delivers the aforementioned zingers or neatly wrapped packets of truth (Maya doesn’t care about anyone else’s success as long as they’re not younger; addiction is a “little jail made of powder”). Everything rings true. The descriptions of a mental hospital, in particular – a separate miniature world with its own infrastructure and routine – is one that patients will recognise. For a book dealing with issues and called Problems, Sharma’s debut is strangely uplifting. It leaves you on a high.