Varun Gauri is the author of the new novel For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus. He teaches at Princeton University, and he lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
Q: What inspired you to write For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, and how did you create your characters Avi and Meena?
A: My parents had an arranged marriage in Delhi. I was raised in America, but my parents wanted me to have an arranged marriage, too. That prospect, or its shadow, crept into my consciousness.
I started to feel that romantic love is a craze, or a sickness, a view I found support for in Romeo and Juliet and Dante's La Vita Nuova. And, for me, love was sometimes a fraught, out-of-control experience, kind of uncomfortable.
I didn't trust anyone to make a choice on my behalf on a subject as significant as marriage, though I guess if I'd known someone like that, I might have let them.
Meena was half consciously modeled on Dorothea Brooke, of Middlemarch, a beautiful and headstrong young woman who believes matrimony is a "state of higher duties." This theory of marriage leads her to wed Edward Casaubon, a self-important scholar whose blood, if you put it under a magnifying-glass, is "all semicolons and parentheses."
Avi's character is the model son many Indian-American mothers dream of, sprinkled with bits of literature's self-denigrating heroes, such as Charlie Brown.
Q: The writer Susan Coll said of the book, "It is a delightful comedy of manners that poses the question of whether every marriage is, in the final analysis, an arrangement." What do you think of that description?
A: It is indeed a delightful novel! Next question? Seriously, Susan is kind to say that.
Meena's mother is a Jane Austen fan, so "comedy of manners" is an apt description. Avi's chapters, in particular, poke at the upstart dreams of middle-class Indian-American entrepreneurs and their global admirers and benefactors. Meena's chapters, in contrast, are earnest and searching, sometimes even dark.
As for marriage being, in the final analysis, an arrangement, that's what Meena's late father said when counseling her to pursue an arranged marriage. Because his marriage was complicated, his tone was philosophical, even cynical.
I do think that the distinction between arranged marriages and "love marriages," as they are called on the subcontinent, is blurrier than many people imagine.
Couples in arranged marriages sometimes (often?) fall in love, or hope to. (A pair of relatives who had an arranged marriage report having had a secret tryst before tying the knot.)
And couples in love marriages sometimes find that the passion they once experienced as freely chosen was actually influenced, even determined, by economic class, social networks, childhood experiences, and psychic forces (or nowadays, some algorithm).
Q: How was the novel's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: In the wedding scene, the Hindu priest who marries Meena and Avi invokes the gods and planets. Astrological consonance is hugely important in Indian arranged marriages. It's a point-of-view in which luck and fate play a large role in happiness, marital and otherwise. It's also a reference to the exquisite, ethereal aspirations many of us have when entering into marriage.
Q: Did you know how the book would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: No! The ending changed at least four times. I'm happy with this version. It fits well with the rest of the book.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a short story about elderly parents, loosely inspired by Alice Munro's Moons of Jupiter. I'm also working on a story about college admissions in the modern age.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I first started this novel when my eldest, now 23, was a toddler. I worked on it off and on (mostly off) for decades. During the Covid pandemic, I had the opportunity to turn to fiction writing in earnest. There were many days, months, years, when I thought I couldn't pull this off. I'm so excited!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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