Book World: Nell Freudenberger’s ‘The Newlyweds’ explores cross-cultural tensions
Page by page, “The Newlyweds” explores the tangled misimpressions and deceptions that separate Amina and George — and sometimes bind them together. An electrical engineer with a penchant for useful factoids, George can sound bossy and condescending, and, let’s face it, there’s something suspicious about shopping for an attractive woman in a poor country. But Amina is far from a helpless mail-order bride lost in a strange land. The more we get to know her, the more we realize just how deliberately she’s carrying out a long and complicated plan that George — “just a piece of the puzzle” — barely comprehends. “She was not a little girl playing a game,” Freudenberger writes. “She was a twenty-four-year-old woman whose family’s future depended on this decision.”
Freudenberger knows Amina as well as Jane Austen knows Emma, and despite its globe-spanning set changes, “The Newlyweds” offers a reading experience redolent of Janeite charms: gentle touches of social satire, subtly drawn characters and dialogue that expresses far more than its polite surface. And how Freudenberger keeps the chapters moving is a mystery of perpetual motion: Waiting for a visa, waiting for a green card, waiting for a job, waiting for a citizenship test — these bureaucratic delays should be no more entertaining than standing in line, but in this lucidly plotted novel, they seem like high drama.
(Knopf/Random House) - “The Newlyweds: A Novel” by Nell Freudenberger.
That success rests largely on the portrayal of Amina, a young woman who can’t shake the sense that she looks wrong. If only she could “dismiss her Deshi self entirely, ask it to wait in the hall,” she thinks. “It was possible to change your own destiny, but you had to be vigilant and you could never look back.” No one as dedicated to her parents as Amina is, though, could fail to look back. Indeed, much of the appeal of “The Newlyweds” is the way she and George negotiate the demands of their respective families with a mixture of affection and exasperation. Moving gracefully between the sterile suburbs of Rochester and the aromatic markets of Dhaka, the novel locates that unsettling inflection point when we shift from being cared for by our parents to caring for them, without ever losing the need to please them, to win their approval, to make them happy.
Suspended between two cultures, two homes 8,000 miles apart, Amina wonders if there’s an essential identity that exists “beneath languages.” She can’t escape her suspicion that the price of assimilation is too high — not just the loss of her Islamic faith and her friends and her food, but the abandonment of any sense of personal solidity. “You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together,” she thinks, “until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.”
As you can tell, “The Newlyweds” is ultimately less romantic than its title. George and Amina soon realize, as any couple must, that they don’t know as much about each other as they once believed. After all, an online algorithm is so primitive compared with the intimate knowledge a village matchmaker can offer a young couple in the villages of Bangladesh. On either side of the world, making a marriage work demands casting off not just old lovers but cherished fantasies about who we are. Whether these two alien lovebirds can — or should — do that is the question Freudenberger poses so beguilingly.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter: @RonCharles.
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