1. I don’t like comic (by which I mean humorous) (by which I mean that “funny” is a primary selling point in marketing materials) (actually it is sort of hard to describe exactly what I mean so never mind) novels.
2. I’ve been wanting to read this one for years.

So the thing is that I don’t care about comic (humorous?) novels or book awards, with a primary exception that I care very much about the Costa Book Awards. This is not, as catty persons have suggested, down to my excessive fondness for sitting in a Costa and pouring cream into my big giant coffee mug and nibbling on a chocolate twist and reading The Guardian.¹ It is because unlike many most all other awards, I have read a number of books solely because they were Costa Award nominees/winners and had them be mad raving successes. See notably: Saffy’s Angel, now one of my all-time favorite kids’ books and possibly my number one top favorite kids’ book discovered in adulthood.

So hence when it was early 2014 and I was choosing The Shock of the Fall to read for podcast, I was also excited by the notion of this book Marriage Material, a comic novel about a man called Arjan Banja who following his father’s death has to leave his posh life in London and come back to Wolverhampton to run the shop in which his father and grandfather toiled all their lives. It wasn’t out in the US, though. UNTIL NOW, ten million zillion years later, thanks to the always-lovely Europa Editions.

The worst trap comic novels can fall into (I reserve the right to modify this opinion without notice) is to shy away from the genuine sadness of its sad moments. Marriage Material doesn’t do this. In three generations of owning this convenience shop, the Banga family faces plenty of prejudice, heartbreak, and loss. The book is funny and keenly observed in ways that made me laugh out loud more than once, but it also lets its characters feel sadness when sadness is indicated — which of course makes the moments of joy and laughter feel all the more earned.

She had grown up, as the result of melodramatic Hindi movies and hysterical funeral rituals, believing that desolation was raucous. But it turned out you could actually lose yourself quite silently, as if it were nothing.

WAIT NO I have changed my mind, the worst actually, let me start over and do this again, the worst trap actually that comic novels can fall into is contempt for its own characters. Being so determined to make everyone into a punchline that they forget to make them human people. Which again, Marriage Material avoids. I grew so fond of everyone in this book –even quite minor characters! — that I kept flipping to the back of the book to see if things were going to turn out all right for them.

Families are the last people who should be entrusted with finding you a spouse, given that they are incapable of appreciating that you may have changed since the age of twelve.

My A+ record with the Costa Prize continues unabated, y’all, by which I mean that I choose to remember my Costa Prize successes and immediately forget the Costa Prize books I read and do not love.

They read it too: S. Krishna’s Books. (Let me know if you read this book and I’ll add a link!)

The post Marriage Material, Sathnam Sanghera appeared first on Reading the End.