A New World

A newly divorced professor returns home to Calcutta and contends with his disconnection from his son, his parents, and life itself in this atmospheric, lushly descriptive novel of loss and the difficulty of continuing on in spite of it. A New World is a tale of a man recovering from a difficult divorce and a story about the way we live now. Set in the 1990s, the book describes a world become, in the wake of the Cold War, more international and interconnected in which, at the same time, connection has grown ever more tenuous and harder to sustain. Jayojit, born and bred in India, is a professor of economics at a college in the American Midwest. His ex-wife has moved to California, taking their young son, Bonny, with her. For summer vacation, Jayojit has brought Bonny to Calcutta to visit his mother and father, a retired admiral in the Indian navy. The heat of summer has moved in when the two arrive; the monsoon will come before they leave. During the course of this stay, Jayojit will brood over the past and try to imagine the future, while enduring the inconveniences and misunderstandings and absurdities of family life and occasionally venturing out, alone or with Bonny, to explore the changing landscape of the city. Present throughout Chaudhuri's pages are questions central to life and to the life of the novel: What is freedom and what is responsibility? What, beyond the commotion of the moment, are the commonalities that bind us together?