Some stories find their strength not in plot, but in characters. Instead of events propelling things forward, it is the reactions and feelings to events that take centre stage. Maniza Naqvi’s The Inn is such a novel; it takes immense pleasure in taking the slowly simmering inadequacies and resentments that exist under the skin of all humans, and bringing them to a boil with the slow, careful craft of a master storyteller.

At its surface, The Inn is a contemporary novel, one meant for our times. It takes into account the history of the past few decades — the destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre, the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the crisis in Sudan — and connects these events to its central characters, so that each moment feels personal to the few around whom the novel revolves.

And yet there is a greater stake involved, where the conversation is not just about the resultant death or misery, but about how the characters felt, or reacted, or were involved in their own flawed ways with each of these moments in time. That is where the novel’s actual strength lies.

A Pakistani-American’s slow-simmering novel that explores the inner lives of its characters as they confront events larger than themselves, is written with the craft of a master storyteller

Our protagonist Salman — casually Americanised to the shorter, non-desi Sal — is the Pakistani immigrant through whose eyes we watch the tale unfurl. Moving from a small village in Punjab to hallowed hospital corridors in Washington, DC, Sal spends his days in a dark room as a radiologist, delivering — sometimes good, but mostly bad — news to worried patients.

Overburdened with the wretchedness of being the frequent bearer of bad news and unable to keep his empathy in check, Sal finds himself in the Virginia countryside, invited there by a nurse friend who wants Sal to relax. But Sal is unable to gel with the friend’s family and so books a room at a nearby inn.

Sylvia and Billy, the retired couple running the inn, are the counterpoint to Sal’s anxiety over his identity, his sense of belonging and his inability to find peace. Having spent time in multiple countries as aid workers, the couple just narrowly misses being a cliché, despite their white saviour complex being out in full force throughout the entirety of the novel.

It is only through a careful unveiling of their humanity that Naqvi manages to make them into fully rounded individuals, with past lives and intricacies that go beyond the formulaic limitations of their professions and interests.

Sylvia and Billy welcome Sal to their inn, at first reluctantly, and then with a degree of warmth and understanding, but their relationship with him has a strain that eventually explodes, in a manner that the author presents as seemingly inevitable.

Can we ever look past who we are and truly understand another? This seems to be the question the author set out to answer in her careful exploration of Sal’s laconic days spent at the inn, interacting with the other guests: Adrian, a man from Sylvia and Billy’s past and Maribeth, the next door neighbour.

These people bring their own issues, their own complicated histories and their biased understanding of the world into Sal’s life, who tries to circumnavigate them as best as he can. Is he flawed himself? The other characters certainly seem to think so, in conversations that revolve around identity, politics, culture and history.

The distinction between what his culture permits and what Sylvia and Billy believe to be right is jarring to Sal.

Sal’s understanding of the world, his obsession with the so-called ‘war on terror’ and his irritation that the others at the Inn never seem to take it seriously enough, provides much of the friction and drives the plot towards its tumultuous conclusion.

Naqvi takes her time exploring this dichotomy between what matters to people. Sal’s marriage to a very young girl back home, and his subsequent divorce, don’t create as big a ripple as does the fact that she’s his cousin. That he decides to leave his young son with his wife, and not fight for him, is a bigger shock to the couple who — by that point — treat Sal like a family member.

This distinction between what his culture permits and what Sylvia and Billy believe to be right, is jarring to Sal, who responds with awkwardness and gloom, unable to explain to this newfound family that what they believe does not necessarily translate into an undeniable truth in his own reality. This distinction is mellow at first, but grows increasingly stronger as the story progresses, culminating in a clash of expressions that seeks to reiterate what the author has been trying to point out all along.

Immigration gets a nod — inevitable, given how assiduously the concept of identity and belonging is threaded throughout the narrative. Sal’s persistent memories of the village in his homeland, coupled with worry for the son he left behind, serve to heighten his feelings of alienation, further reinforcing his belief that no one cares about the drone attacks on Pakistani soil as much as he does.

As Sal’s frustration mounts, so does his friends’ irritation with what they see as his rage, his inability to relax, his insistence that only he understands pain. At numerous instances, they try to convince him to see the Inn as a temporary place of belonging, to see Virginia as an island of relaxation, or to find pleasure in the quiet peacefulness of the American countryside. Juxtaposing the Inn’s importance in Sal’s life to his mounting sense of unease in America is masterfully done, and a tactic that the author

employs to the maximum.

Strewn through the pages is an abundance of nature. The setting is important and Naqvi pays careful attention to detailing the scenery. A variety of trees — birch, maple, dogwood, elm, mulberry, oak and sycamore — put in appearances. These are accompanied by poison ivy and wild grass, weeds and the creatures that sneak among them. Animals of all types lurk around, native species described in all their spectacular glory.

In some places, the story feels slow and meandering, purposeless but not irritatingly so. The occasionally sluggish, intermittent dialogue takes its sweet time to reach a point of purpose. The first half has a sort of lazy, desultory feel, redolent of languid summer days when there’s not much to do. In the second half, the pace accelerates as emotions long held in check bubble to the surface.

A very careful exploration of the outer atmosphere, as well as the rich inner lives of her characters, The Inn by Naqvi is a novel worth reading a second time.

The reviewer is an editor of English course books. She tweets @anumshaharyar

The Inn
By Maniza Naqvi
Maktaba-e-Danyal, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9694191041
278pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 27th, 2022