The Smooth Surface

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From the discreet burgundy shade of his silk tie to his delicate suede shoes to his beautiful white skin, Jonathan Bridgeman is the ideal Englishman. True, his background is a bit murky—they say he was raised in colonial India—but he affords the proper impression, and in a well-manicured world where impressions are all that matter, he fits in seamlessly. But Jonathan Bridgeman isn't English. He isn't Indian. He isn't anything at all.

Identity—precious, elusive, fakable—is at the heart of Hari Kunzru's engaging debut novel The Impressionist (Penguin; 481 pages), which explores what it is to be Indian, English and all that lies between. The boy who would will himself into becoming Jonathan Bridgeman was born Pran Nath, spoiled heir to a wealthy Hindu clan in WW I-era British India. He is celebrated for his royal paleness—until he is revealed to be the half-breed bastard of a British officer. Teenage Pran is promptly tossed from his house and launched on a journey to the ragged ends of a dying empire in search of a self as formless as a discarded robe.

Kidnapped by dissolute Indian courtiers, Pran undergoes the first of his metamorphoses by becoming Rukhsana, dressing in girl's clothing as bait to blackmail clueless British colonial officers of confused sexuality. Kunzru's alcohol-soaked collision of English stiffness and Indian sensuality has a Dickensian slant (though with more buggery than one remembers from The Pickwick Papers). After an apocalyptic tiger hunt, Rukhsana takes refuge in Bombay, where by day he learns English and by night rules the red lights as a half-breed hustler called Pretty Bobby.

It's in seething Bombay that Bobby becomes convinced he can bridge the racial chasm of British India and pass as English. Bobby swipes the identity of an orphaned British lad and steals to England, where public school and Oxford pour the new Jonathan Bridgeman into the mold of a proper Englishman, only to have that mold ultimately crack.

Kunzru is as adaptable as his protean protagonist, effortlessly evoking a lush Indian landscape and a romantic Oxford, switching from wit to weight without misstep. But something is lacking. Kunzru's hero has identities to spare but no soul, and in the end he crumbles away. Kunzru's writing suffers similarly: it is the work of a brilliant literary impressionist who hits every symbol, fulfills every gesture, while missing something essential beneath the shining surface. Perhaps he knows this. "In between each impression," Kunzru writes, "just at the moment when one person falls away and the next has yet to take possession, the impressionist is completely blank. There is nothing there at all."