"Saturated," a sign might as well say to young writers aspiring to enter the field of immigrant literature. Diaspora and its accompanying sense of loss have been explored again and again by each new generation of writers.

Kiran Desai, who first won acclaim for her Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, takes on the experience of diaspora in her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Desai expands the scope of traditional immigrant literature to address imperialism as well. The approach is ambitious—her narrative never fully resolves the tensions of a country trying to modernize without losing its own dignity. But Desai's voice, which is consistently strong and original, gives Inheritance a unique appeal.

The novel takes its historical background from a series of riots between 1986 and 1988 in Kalimpong and the surrounding villages in West Bengal, India. The riots were inspired by demands for a separate state—"Gorkhaland"—based on ethnic distinctions, and became so bitter that the town was virtually besieged, leading to state intervention. Desai beings her story in the middle of the riots: a former judge is suffering the indignity of serving a gang of unschooled Gorkha boys who drink his wine and rob him of his guns.

Desai uses extended flashbacks to life in Kalimpong before the Gorkhas' mobilization to explore the conflicting cultural identities—Hindu and British—of wealthy and educated Indians. During his four years at school in Cambridge, England, the young judge takes refuge in the library, dreading the ridicule of his peers and of young girls who giggle at his curry smell. Unable to deal with the collision of identities, the judge becomes consumed by self-loathing. Decades later, his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, is sent to him from an English convent. Sai and the old judge live with their loyal bumbling cook, who is so ritually overlooked by the judge that he is never given a name.

Far away in New York, Biju, the cook's son, is in fact not getting rich. In a city that offers so much, he is hopping from one restaurant to another, always dogged by the fear that he will be discovered as an illegal worker. Serving in upscale restaurants that are "perfectly first-world on top, perfectly third-world twenty-two steps below", Biju wonders that in a country of such wealth, only so little is available to him. He wanders from place to place, seeking something reminiscent of home, but even at Delhi Café, all he finds is an owner just as lost between identities.

Imperialism and immigration, then, are not too different. Desai shows that they are both the internalized warring of identities. The immigrant tries to hold his own in a sea of foreign-ness, hoping desperately to assimilate and clinging to his native self just as fiercely. The once-colonized country negotiates between the new, "better" way of life inherited from the imperialists and national pride, surging with the anger of the righteous wronged. There is loss in both. And Desai makes this point with an unexpected style of writing. Her prose exploits the extent to which punctuation, capitalization, and grammar can be used as means of expression. Passages such as the following, describing Biju's fear of the US Immigration Office, are stunningly effective.

They put down the phone hurriedly then, worried that immigration had a superduper zing bing beep peeping high-alert electronic supersonic space speed machine that could

transfer
connect
dial
read
trace the number through to their—

Illegality.

Desai's animated voice whispers, commands, and even seems to laugh. But she also has high expectations of her audience, who must keep many details, sequences, and plot lines in mind throughout the book, an exhausting task. Though the unraveling and convergence of these story lines, about as clean as one could reasonable expect from such a complex book, are satisfying.

The Inheritance of Loss has a tremendous potential to sadden. It reveals divisions in society that are so deeply entrenched that they can never be ironed smooth. Living is difficult, Desai admits, and it can irreparably damage a person, like the embittered judge. But neither the book itself nor the characters in it are despairing. Hope sends Biju to the kitchens of every restaurant in New York, and hope brings him back home.

Nancy Yang should stop trying to find pieces of herself in immigrant narratives and just enjoy them like normal people.