Lucky Boy – A Tale of Attachment

LUCKY BOY, NOVEL, SHANTHI SEKARAN, PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, ATTACHMENT, IMMIGRATION, IMMIGRANTS, NOVEL, MATERNAL BOND, PATERNAL BOND

Shanthi Sekaran’s novel Lucky Boy is an easy read, even if it is long and too artfully and self-consciously constructed to be engrossing.  It tells the tale of two women – Soli, a woman from absolutely nowhere Mexico running to the United States for a better life – and Kavya – a first generation Indian American woman married to Rishi – also a first generation Indian American.  The novel alternates between chapters describing Soli’s trek from Mexico towards the United States and, inevitably, Berkeley, where her cousin lives with her cousin’s two children, and chapters describing Kavya’s life, which includes working as a cook for a sorority at UC Berkeley and trying, without luck, to become pregnant with Rishi.

The Lucky Boy of the title is Soli’s child – who is conceived on the road to the US – perhaps through love and perhaps through rape – both befall Soli on the way.  It is inevitable, for almost three hundred pages, that the lives of these two women will intersect through Ignacio, the lucky boy that is born to Soli.  While reading these pages I both considered giving up on the book – it was pleasant enough but focused largely on telling about the lives of these two women from an objective vantage point – I didn’t feel like I was really getting much access to them – and I was convinced I would not write about it.  There was little here of merit.  That changed at the moment Ignacio was born.

There is something very strange about having a child.  It alters you (or at least it altered me) in the most fundamental ways imaginable.  I was now connected to another human being in a way that I had never been connected to anyone in my life before.  As I have mentioned before, talking with other parents, they get it – but it is like a secret club – you have to have had a child to belong.  Sekaran takes the reader through three very different processes to achieve this result.  Soli’s experience of giving birth to the child she calls Nacho, Kavya’s experience of choosing Ignacio to foster parent and hopefully to adopt, and Rishi’s coming around to connecting with Iggy as his father, long after Kavya has given herself over to him.  The description of each of these three very different but parallel processes of attachment rung very true to me and each of them were emotionally evocative in ways that I had not anticipated they would be based on the writing to that point.

I cannot know if the powerful emotions evoked in me would be evoked in someone who has not gone through the attachment process with a child.  That attachment process, as exemplified by Kavya and Rishi, does not have to be a birth process.  I think that my sister went through a similar experience as she became the aunt to my son, and I know that my friends who have adopted describe a similar fundamental shift – a seeming movement in the cosmos.  Everything feels different as a result of this attachment.

Sekaran uses the attachment of each of these people to this boy to play out the plot in the second half of the book.  The attachment is the glue that holds the last half of the book together.  What that plot is does not, on some level, matter.  What matters is the glue and Sekaran's ability to describe it in such a way that I remember such silly things about my own attachment process as hearing every love song on the radio as the song expressing the love of a parent for a child – and avoiding watching television for a year because the violent deaths of every person on every show depicting it were the deaths of someone’s child – and that I remembered much more solemn things – the sense that my life was no longer my own – that I was living, at least in part, very much for someone else and that I could no longer treat my life with the same casual disregard I once had done.  And it is this solemn attachment  that drives the drama of the last half.

I am dismissive of the particulars of the drama, but appreciate that they exist at this moment on another level.  Despite my observations about my own sense of attachment to my son in the immediate aftermath of his birth (and vestiges of that still bind us together twenty years later), I found myself disconnected from the immigration crisis and the forced separation of children from their parents.  I’m not sure what kicked in for me during that process – how it was that I did suddenly become aware of the cruel implications of what we were doing – how it was that I somehow hadn’t known before at all either professionally (see my post about Daniel Stern’s work) or personally (see the paragraph above) just how devastating the impact of that separation would be on the infant and on the parent. 

This book, at times with too much detail, works hard to humanize its protagonists.  We cannot dismiss Soli as an other - as someone essentially foreign to us, nor Kavya, nor Rishi.  I think we identify with them through something much more powerful than the laboriously drawn descriptions that Sekaran provides – though the background may be important.  I think that we connect with them through the descriptions of their reactions – the felt experiences that they have in the context of having a child enter their lives in the way this child enters into each of their lives.  I think we would have had that experience based on Sekaran’s ability to create within us the feelings that she is attributing to her protagonists.

That said, I think that the long read is not wasted.  We learn a lot about these three people, imaginary though they may be.  We also learn about the experience of being both a documented child of immigrants and an undocumented immigrant and we learn about the justice system, including the various injustices that it metes out.  But all of this is ultimately in service of learning, once again, that it is the bonds of attachment that connect us and that this boy – whom some might pity based on all that befalls him – deserves to be considered lucky because of the attachment that he has experienced with these three adults.  

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