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How should writers respond to the sound and fury of the current political moment? When the times frequently produce dramas more lurid and fantastical than anything even the most gifted novelist could dream up, how can literature compete? The solution offered by the Indian-born US journalist, author and professor Amitava Kumar is not to turn away from the daily outrage of the news and #fakenews but to embrace it. By engaging in an activism of the word, this erudite, original and ultimately unsatisfying book intends to pit the radical surprise of real life against the lies of the rulers. In this way, Kumar hopes to preserve the uncomfortable or disturbing truth against unrelenting and widespread assault.

We can be sure what this novel is trying to do, because it keeps telling us. It does so via its narrator Satya, an Indian-born US journalist, author and professor who is attending an artists retreat on an Italian island that is said to be where George and Amal Clooney spend their summers. Satya is working on a novel called Enemies of the People which, he says, is based on an untrue story in fact, on the many untrue stories that surround us. The plot of A Time Outside This Time, such as it is, comprises a collage of news clippings, tweets and anecdotes Satya has collected as well as abstracts of psychology papers he has read and journalism he has conducted on the subject of truth and lies.

Instead of what used to be called a bourgeois novel dismissively glossed as the human heart in conflict with itself et cetera Satya/Kumar serves up a torrent of namechecks and information. A future reader would find in this book a kind of time capsule of the Trump years: through it pass not just Donald (and Ivanka) but Hillary Clinton, Sarah Silverman, Anthony Fauci, George Floyd, Narendra Modi, Marina Abramovi and Tina Fey (Oh, Tina Fey). Here you can learn about the DunningKruger effect, the Milgram experiment, the marshmallow test, VS Naipauls meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini, Gandhis brush with Spanish flu and George Orwells fathers involvement in the Raj opium trade. There are more intimate sections, such as flashbacks to Satyas childhood memories of anti-Muslim riots in India and descriptions of his newspaper commissions about men and women caught up in webs of state oppression. But everything is related in the bloodless prose of a Washington Post editorial: He was dead five years later, we read of one character, from a heart attack, while he was walking with his wife to a restaurant. This was a sad event.

When, early in the book, Satya declares, to be honest, I thought I had a handle on the truth, I wondered if his claim to be writing an anti-bourgeois novel before cocktail hour at a lakeside villa with the Clooneys summering nearby was a sly ruse. Perhaps like one of Kazuo Ishiguros myopic, affectless narrators he would become more and more enmeshed in his misperceptions and self-deceptions until his worldview was overturned. An early detour, in which he discovers more than meets the eye in a Pakistani migrants story of entrapment by the US police, seems to promise as much. But as the novel progresses, the radical surprise of real life is increasingly and surprisingly absent. Satya is a good husband to a good woman, a research psychologist named Vaani whose only real purpose in the story is to tell him about experimental cognitive studies he goes on to summarise at length. Late on we discover she has an ex-husband who hosts a Fox News-like show on Indian TV, conveniently providing Satya with an opportunity to sermonise against rising nationalist bigotry under Modi.

Any good novel, Satya reminds us, quoting the historian Timothy Snyder, enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others. But sincerely intending to dramatise ambiguous situations and the intentions of others is not the same thing as doing it. In fiction, all the information in the world whether true or false is no substitute for the enlivening portrayal of character, relationship, interiority, et cetera.

A Time Outside This Time is published by Picador (14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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A Time Outside This Time by Amitava Kumar review #fakenews onslaught - The Guardian