Perfect Score

The daughter of immigrants has her life blighted by the drive for academic success.

GIFTED

By Nikita Lalwani

Random House. 273 pp. $23.95

The day before school started this year, my wife received an e-mail from a student enrolled in her English class. He wanted to know if he could narrow the margins of his summer homework by a quarter of an inch because his answers were running long.

Such are the joys of teaching in the overachievement capital of the country. As the well-heeled and the big-brained dive back into schoolwork this month, I wish they (and especially their parents) would take a break to read this arresting new novel by Kikita Lalwani. Gifted-- the title grows more bitter with each chapter -- describes the plight of Rumi, an Indian girl in Cardiff, Wales, whose life is systematically destroyed by the drive for academic success.

To some extent, Gifted reminds me of Josiah Bunting's All Loves Excelling (2001), a melodramatic tale about a girl who works herself to death at a prestigious prep school. But Lalwani, a BBC documentary filmmaker, is a more subtle writer, and she's working on a much bigger canvas. Her sensitivity to the pressures felt by Indian immigrants calls to mind the work of such novelists as Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, writers who hear the humor amid the anxiety of integration.

What's particularly interesting in G ifted is the way Lalwani forces her characters to contend with cultural stereotypes. Rumi and her family know only too well how they're expected to act; the role of ambitious Indian immigrant is both applauded and mocked all around them. But despite their best efforts to step around these clich?s, they frequently humiliate themselves by playing right into them.

Early in the book, when Rumi is only 5, her teacher insists on visiting her parents at home to announce the exciting news that "Rumi is a gifted mathematician!" But her father, Mahesh, is baffled, then irritated. "I am also a mathematician," he tells the teacher as calmly as he can. "I am glad that she is doing well in this subject, as you say. I have placed emphasis on it because it is my area of specialty." Inside, though, he's seething: "What did she take him for? And why was she so surprised that he and his daughter could string numbers together with reasonable panache? They were hardly shopkeepers." He's offended by the term "gifted." To anyone who will listen, Mahesh insists that it is possible "through strength and discipline to create your own destiny using the power of thought." Rumi's teacher can sputter on however she'd like, but he knows there is no gift, no trick, no special dispensation -- there is only hard work.

Having always found the "gifted" label laughably imprecise and vaguely eugenic, I was immediately in Mahesh's camp, but what follows is the story of his disastrous attempt to make Rumi reach her potential. Driven by his faith in hard work and self-determination, Mahesh could put any local Edline addict to shame. He supervises every aspect of Rumi's education and regiments her study time with prison-like discipline, alternately insisting and assuming that she shares his goal for her: to be accepted into Oxford University before she turns 15.

Like most adolescents, Rumi is more interested in fitting in and preserving "her carefully arranged obscurity." She fantasizes about a romance with another chess geek and worries about her classmates. "If the whole friends things was like a Venn diagram," she thinks, "she wasn't even inside the outer circle." Only two other "brainboxes" ever talk with her, and "even then only outside the school boundaries or they ran the risk of being ridiculed."

At first, Lalwani mines this parent-child tension for some surprisingly charming humor -- a kind of "Bend It Like Euclid." Her father's strict rules, his efforts to make sure every activity has an improving quality to it, have a kind of absurd comedy about them. Her weekends are "timetabled to the maximum, the days compartmentalized into breaks and study like the black and white keys on a piano." Rumi commits slight infractions amid the "constant buzz of discipline." Left alone in the library, she dares to wander away from her textbook and read Pippi Longstocking. "It was always a pleasure soaked in guilt," she thinks.

But as Rumi grows older, Lalwani strips the comedy away, and "the sodden misery of the whole thing" weighs on the novel more and more. "I am a weirdo," Rumi realizes, as she continues to see the world in terms of equations and patterns. Torn between pleasing her parents and nurturing her soul, she falls into a series of bizarre tics and self-destructive habits, signs of distress that someone would have noticed if everyone around her wasn't so impressed by her mathematical prowess.

Lalwani handles Rumi's parents with the same insight, which usually keeps them from seeming like villains. Mahesh has nothing but his daughter's best interests in mind, no matter how misguided his method. And he clearly adores her. One morning he rises early and watches through a crack in the door as she sleeps, "feeling the claustrophobic muffle of a love he could not express."

Rumi's mother, meanwhile, never imagined she'd end up living permanently in the West. She's not gotten used to the smugness of her white colleagues, the horrible food, the casual sex. She endures moments of "sudden desolation" in this strange and judgmental place. As much as she wants to raise Rumi outside the restrictive ideals of her own parents back in India, she's panicked by the startling immorality of modern culture. Trying to keep Rumi on the straight and narrow, she even descends to "archaic warnings that had infuriated her when she was growing up." In one heartbreaking scene, she shrieks at Rumi's innocent questions about human biology: "That is not how our babies are born. Only white people have sex."

The parts of this novel are better than the whole, which tends to shift tones too erratically. But Lalwani does a number of things extremely well here. She won't let us settle back in comfortable judgment on this family. Mahesh's behavior seems to confirm the worst slurs about a "money-hungry immigrant, desperate to profit from his daughter's ability . . . [and] subvert the freethinking traditions of the West." But Lalwani also lashes out at Western bias with its "priggish outrage." The result is a tragic coming-of-age story full of the mingled love and anger that animate families of every culture. ?

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World. He can be reached at charlesr@washpost.com.