No Default to The Default World — excerpt from a draft of a forthcoming review of Naomi Kanakia’s literary novel published this month last year:

"Excuse me, but are you trans?"

Thus opens the free-rambling sometimes biting dramedy of Naomi Kanakia's rough and raw first literary novel, The Default World. The novel presents a nipping critique and exploration of a world wherein “Excuse me, but” begins to set the bold tenor of the narration, though the novel often reads like one long cancel culture party at, say, Oberlin College — with all the psychologically intoxicated highs and lows that that may entail — while the main characters are twenty-somethings who live in San Francisco.

Kanakia can write, even as the story spins its wheels, which some might see as more a feature than a bug. A lot of the novel reads like a description of twenty-somethings who act like they are in their early and mid teens, or like a flock of fiery siblings who take turns thinking, suggesting, and essentially declaring, "I will kill you! And your whole life!" "No, I will kill you. And your whole life!" And then they make up with each other the next day — or they don’t.

If you like Céline, Houellebecq, Dostoevsky, and Ralph Ellison, then there's no reason you should not like The Default World.

There's an interesting class or class conscious line that runs through the novel, as the main character, Jhanvi, cannot afford multiple transition surgeries — or even housing. The aggressive and self-loathing, confident and self-effacing, self-propelling protagonist Jhanvi schemes to extract what resources and friendship she can from the wealthy clique she knows and hangs with while critiquing them, sometimes disparagingly. Love is also an immediate yet frustrating and seemingly distant goal.

This class line, class consciousness in the story is extremely truncated. All the focus of the class conflicts, pressures, and needs are pushed on Jhanvi's acquaintances and sometimes receptive, sometimes skittish friends, also on the overwhelmed far-off parents, rather than on any sector or feature of society — government, religion, the media, or other organizations and officials.

Thus the stark but clipped class critique and exploration is made almost entirely a personal and cliquish matter, rather than a more encompassing societal critique, which creates nonstop personal civil war among the characters in their assigned roles, with essentially no thought or action or exploration toward social and political struggle. Bits of slightly broader class critique crop up, if micro-targeted, essentially clique-based too — Jhanvi wouldn’t fit in with this crowd or that crowd, and so on. To note the class limitation of this type of novel is not necessarily to criticize it but to critique it, perhaps it needs be pointed out. A criticism would be the sort of analysis I often put forth at length elsewhere — institutional analyses of literary forces and production, which I touch on later, though barely.

Kanakia loves to drop very novelistic reflections and takeaways on the personal scenarios and micro-social happenings and ways of thinking and being. It's all very scrutinized, the plight of Jhanvi and her view of her default crowd, in this social and biological transitory (yet enduring) stage of her life — a study of alienation, resentment, kinship, and other modes of being in a soul-crushing situation where needs go badly unmet. To this distinct quest for fulfillment and the meeting of basic needs, the novel gives indelible witness and makes every attempt at felt comprehension…