Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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All this to say, I’m not sure how best to categorise Western Lane but I’m interested in how readers read it. How does it feel to be nominated for the Booker Prize 2023, and what would winning the prize mean to you - especially as one of several debut novelists on the longlist? Western Lane is about a young girl and her family who are grieving the loss of a family member, and who channel this grief into squash. I don’t know what makes these books endure in my mind, but maybe in part it is the feeling of having genuinely encountered the private world of another person, a sensibility – the narrator’s or the author’s, perhaps both. As I began writing, it made sense to me – the way attention is focused outwards in the game, the concentration, the movement of bodies in sync with one another.

To my left is a wardrobe, to my right above my desk the exhibition poster from the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Tove Jansson retrospective, showing Moomintroll standing in an open window looking out into the dark. It’s humbling to see Western Lane amongst all the books that have been longlisted in the history of the prize. I had the feeling that spoken language had become a wall for the girls, an obstacle to knowing and being known. Chetna Maroo resides in London and has contributed her stories to esteemed publications such as the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review.

She becomes aware that Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan, who have no children of their own, want her to live with them in Edinburgh. In a reflective moment about her creative process, Chetna Maroo shared insights during an interview, where she explained that the book had been essentially crafted as a compilation of dense short stories, mostly in the first person. Cautioned by a concerned relative to find a healthy outlet for his daughters, Pa turns the family’s casual weekly squash game at a local sports center into daily, determined training sessions. She loves listening to the “sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard”, which has an echo “louder than the shot itself”.

Just as important to the novel, and just as vivid, is the almost inexpressible experience of a human body negotiating a transparent box, the heightened awareness that “Jahangir had for a situation, his sense for what was going on behind him”. It is not so much the shot itself that Gopi is hearing, but that echo, the empty reverb, the lonely response as the ball’s impact gives the striker a split second to retreat to the T, the center of the court, and prepare to counteract her opponent’s responding shot. In the unlikely arena of a high-pressure tournament match, she finally discovers a place where “no one was rushing me, and if I wanted to, I could think”. Interestingly, before embarking on her writing career, Chetna Maroo had worked as an accountant, a lesser-known facet of her professional journey.Though I played squash for many years and the game is still vivid in my imagination I don’t know where the connection with this grieving family came from, but I trusted it. Given the familiar storyline presented, The Guardian's Caleb Klaces noted that readers "might expect Western Lane to feel formulaic, but it doesn’t. It seemed such an off-the-wall idea but it brought to my mind something Lorrie Moore suggested in her introduction to The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories About Childhood: that the acquisition of knowing and the subject of knowing or not knowing are ‘the unshakeable centre of any childhood story’. And if you’d let me have a Booker-longlisted novel, I’d add My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. My own process seems unwise to me because I know I’ll eventually cut sections that I’ve spent weeks or months going over, but I have no other way.

It started with the feeling of being inside a squash court, with a voice saying, ‘There were three of us. Hers is an unhurried performance, as if leaving open breathing room for the unspeakable, the absent, and perhaps even a little space for hopeful potential. Gopi is attuned to subtle details that offer clues to the inner lives of the adults around her: Pa’s failure to fix a radiator, low voices in the garden at night, a spilled glass of chaas. I have to trust that the work will benefit in the end from the rhythm and slow quality of this attention. What made you choose sport - and squash in particular - as a way for the family to deal with their grief?When Gopi occasionally remembers something about her mother, it is visceral – watching Wimbledon while eating strawberries with sugar. Whenever she felt adrift during her writing, she would revisit that opening page, which she considered a steadfast anchor for her creative orientation. Taking a break and immersing herself in various readings ultimately led to a significant breakthrough. I usually try to get each sentence and paragraph sounding right before I go on, reading and editing from the beginning of the story.

This challenge was particularly pronounced when she had to switch between the perspective of the child and the retrospective narrator. There was also something about the squash court itself, about the simple white box: it’s such a surreal, unfamiliar place, and in part because of the unfamiliarity it’s a place where time seems suspended and the outside world can be forgotten. At the start of Chetna Maroo’s polished and disciplined debut, Gopi, an 11-year-old Jain girl who has just lost her mother, stands on a squash court outside London. The novel follows Gopi, an 11-year-old girl who has been playing squash since she could first grasp a racket.

Her stories have been published in the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly and the Dublin Review and she was the recipient of the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction. The language barrier meant they “pulled at her, pushed into her, made ourselves physical in her presence”. Gopi is attracted to Ged’s stammer because “it seemed like you were drifting close to him in the silence”. Pa is outwardly positive, but Gopi reads his “eyes and body”: “He was telling us that in one day we had exposed him, left him behind, left him wide open to whatever was coming for him. Chetna Maroo’s debut novel begins a few days after 11-year-old Gopi’s mother’s funeral, which leaves Gopi and her two older sisters in the care of their father.