Enter Title Here - A Review

“All Indian American novels are about being trapped between our Indian and our American identities. And all young adult novels are about wanting to be popular and snare the handsome boy. Mashing them together is a can’t-fail combination” - Reshma Kapoor, Enter Title Here

If a book were to epitomise "meta", Enter Title Here, would be it.

Author: Rahul Kanakia

Publisher: Disney-Hyperion (August 2, 2016)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1484723872

Reshma Kapoor is a high school senior in search of a hook. Being valedictorian and at one of the most prestigious public high schools in the country isn’t enough to get into Stanford – not if you’re an Indian American with “average” SAT scores. What you need is a hook. So she decides to write a novel about an overachieving Indian girl named Reshma, who writes about experiencing all the typical American teenage milestones like kissing, partying and sex, in order to create a hook to get into Stanford. And Enter Title Here is that novel. Meta much?  

Confused? Go read the book. A major part of my delight while reading it was trying to untangle all the references within references. Enter Title Here is like the inception of young adult novels. However, it breaks many tropes of the genre, the most important being that the main character (it would be a stretch to call her a protagonist) is thoroughly unlikeable. And she stays that way. Even as you grow to understand her motivations and sympathise with her, you’ll never be able to empathise with her (if you do I’m terrified of you). She’s driven, amoral, and ruthless. Sharply intelligent and stunningly stupid; brutally self-serving and spectacularly self-destructive; Reshma has multidimensional layers that unravel through the course of the novel. And that’s why I call this book a feminist win. Rarely do you find a female character (especially a teenage character) who is allowed to be both complex and unlikeable.

Enter Title Here is filled with complex female characters, who are made even more unknowable because we’re seeing them through Reshma’s eyes and she’s definitely not a reliable narrator. There’s Reshma’s friend/rival/drug dealer Alex, who is both drawn to and disgusted by Reshma’s “soullessness” and nemesis Chelsea, whose friendliness never fails no matter what provocation Reshma throws at her.  I never felt like these girls were side characters in Reshma’s story but rather that they all had their own stories, which just happened to intersect with hers.

The male love interests, while nowhere near as interesting as the girls, are also respectably drawn with realistic motivations and stories of their own. The only relatively flat characters were Reshma’s parents, especially her father, which was a real shame considering that the main conflict of the book turned out to be related her relationship with her parents. In fact, in an example of the meta-ness of this book, Dr. Wasserman, Reshma’s therapist who’s giving her writing advice, even mentions that the father character is underdeveloped, yet he remains that way till the end. I still can’t decide whether this is an example of Kanakia’s genius or laziness!

Enter Title Here didn’t just make me think, it forced me to think. Many times in the novel one of the characters would read parts of her book (which was actually the book I had on my computer screen) and comment exactly what I would have commented at that point. It was downright bizarre to see a book character seemingly reach into my mind like that! Kanakia would let me build up one impression about a particular character or situation only to turn my judgement on its head three pages later. I thought at least five times that “the book must be about to end now”, because we seemed to have reached a resolution, only to realise that I’d come nowhere close to the ending.

There is so much more I could say about this book, but then I’d never stop raving. Instead I’d like to talk about something that made me uncomfortable. Readers familiar with the desi YA genre will notice a startlingly similarity between Reshma’s motivations for writing her novel and How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, Kavya Vishwanathan’s 2006 novel about a studious Indian American girl who decides to experience all the typical American teenager milestones in order to become interesting enough to pass her Harvard interview. Opal Mehta, was later pulled from shelves and the author disgraced because of allegations of plagiarism. How ironic is it that a book in which plagiarism is a major plot point “borrows” from the work and personal life of an author who was also accused of plagiarism! Is this meta or plain old plagiarism?

Despite the uncomfortable similarity to Opal Mehta, I do urge everyone to pick up this book. It’s been a long time since a book, especially a young adult novel, made me think so much and made me desperate to talk about it with someone. There are so many issues it touches – racism; intergenerational divides in immigrant families; the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” narrative; privilege; mental health; but it does it so naturally that only when I was writing this review did I fully understand the number of issues that Kanakia touches. Read it, and please get back to me so that we can discuss it!