By Sarah Sukardi
I would like to tell a story through a book review. But first, I need to go to the beginning, before I go into novels and all those other larger objects and ideas. I need to begin with the first literary technique—that is, with metaphors.
There are two parts to a metaphor, the “tenor” and the “vehicle.” The tenor is the subject of the metaphor, the thing low to the ground. And the vehicle is the object that the tenor is equated with, the high-concept object that inflects the tenor with its attributes, makes it soar, or at least, proceed horizontally at high velocity.
“A teak switch of a girl:”—tenor, “girl;” vehicle, “teak switch.”
Now, books are not metaphors; nor are metaphors themselves perfect or even good methods of conveying meaning. But much of the wondrousness of a metaphor comes from its imprecision. Because with this slippery technique, we can construct hierarchies of meaning, assign one object the splendor or indignity of another, emphasize the importance of what we deign to be metaphorical about.
Within this imperfect metaphor about metaphors, we can assign the relationships in many books to two different categories: romance and friendship. The tenor would be the romantic relationship, usually of a particular kind: heterosexual, intraracial, monogamous. The friendships surrounding the romance may lend color and dynamism to the text, bringing our understanding of the narrator to new heights. But they are ancillary, vehicular, receding back to the background after they are trotted out for a brief and blazing moment to do their good work.
Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut novel, All This Could Be Different, argues against this assignation. The novel is about S—, a twenty three year old Indian immigrant settling into her first job in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Only midway into the book do we learn that her name is Sneha, and why she loathes it.) Sneha is a consultant-in-training, living in an uneasy late-millennial avocado-toast-esque mixture of petit luxury and precarity. She lounges on tufted sofas and World Market rugs while consuming Wendy’s chicken sandwiches for 177 consecutive meals during a period of depression and economic scarcity.
However, Thankam admonishes, “this is not a story about work or precarity.” Rather, it’s about a gay, brown, immigrant woman in the Midwest in her self-proclaimed slut era, staving off loneliness by scouring the dating websites and going on various mediocre dates with women, most of them white.
That is, until she meets Marina. Marina is the opposite of our narrator, both physically and psychically, a white girl “pink in all the right places” with a hot, volatile ex-girlfriend, the tight, lithe body of a dancer (which of course, she is), and no college degree. Marina rejects Sneha’s first attempts at conversation on the dating app, and they encounter one another over and over again in situations which fluctuate from possible to highly improbable. Nevertheless, we follow the course of their on-again, off-again relationship throughout the novel, as we might in many other novels supposedly like it: the aborted messages, the fumbled drinks, the first dates and first lies and third fights, and so on.
And yet, though this relationship stretches across the entire length of the book, this is not a story about love, either. Rather, All This Could Be Different upends the rigid hierarchy of romance and friendship. For foremost, friendship is the tenor of the novel, and Mathews conceives of friendship with the same rigor that writers usually, and uniquely, accord to romantic relationships.
That is to say: All This Could Be Different portrays friendships as volatile, complex, often arduous things, difficult to foster, liable to be upended with lies and betrayal, maddening and rich and wonderful, powered by something more unknowable than lust. Friendship is not platonic or inert; it is the supreme form of love that Mathews can conceive of, and this novel is how she teaches us how to practice this reversal of tenor and vehicle—one of the many imaginings of “different” to which the novel’s title refers.
As for the friends of the novel—the emotional center of Mathews’ queer bildungsroman—they are Thom and Tig, and a small constellation of other friends: KJ, Amit, an ex-date with a bob dubbed Pulp Fiction. Both Thom and Tig are unlikely friends for Sneha: Tig is a black genderqueer poly person, “a little on the fat side,” that Sneha meets while looking for friends on the dating apps. Thom is her straight guy friend from college whom she refers to her company for a job, and who thus follows her to Milwaukee.
These are not friendships that come easily, and this novel pays no tributes to anything as platitudinal as the “enduring power of friendship.” Rather, this is a novel about the precarity of friendship, the work it requires to love someone devoid of wanting to fuck them. It’s about the work of friendship, deeply unsexy thing it is, and what it takes to make a friendship continue: the disclosures and givings and takings and fighting against the urges to keep oneself unknown, and thus safe. We see them kindle the brittle and growing flame of their friendship through firings, late payments, evictions, weddings, and breakups as the characters try to imagine what a life centered around friendship might look like, and encounter the forces that make such a life improbable.
Mathews’ novel is written at the sustained level of a growl. It is understated, dangerous, and sexy—both warning and invitation. The sentences are taut and precise, and each layer of shame unfurls painstakingly with the reticence of a petal. It’s about the realities of the eponymous “all this”: how addiction often wavers in and out of being, how diagnoses tend to linger, how annoying humans generally are to one another. Ultimately, All This Could Be Different is a novel that shows us the work of love in its highest form: not the kind between people drawn together by fickle laws of attraction that may or may not be embedded in them from birth, but that which comes from choice. It’s a stunning ethos and debut from a voice I’d follow to Milwaukee, and wherever else she chooses to take us.
All This Could Be Different is available from Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Book Soup, Eso Won Books, Laguna Beach Books, and Powell’s City of Books.
Sarah Sukardi is an essayist and occasional critic who lives in Brooklyn. Sukardi is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.