Meeting Tania James for the first time feels a lot like delving into the first several pages of “Atlas of Unknowns,” her debut novel.
Like her quirky yet relatable characters, James is approachable and inviting. She greets you wearing jeans, no shoes and a big warm smile. She insists on getting you something to drink as she welcomes you into her parents' Louisville home.
But after just a few pages into the book, a few minutes into a conversation with James, you know you're dealing with brilliance.
Junot Diaz, the Pulitzer-winning author of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” described “Atlas of Unknowns” as “an astonishment of a debut, so radiant with life, with love, with good old human struggle that I had trouble detaching myself from its pages.” Critically acclaimed author Nathan Englander (“The Ministry of Special Cases”) calls her “the real deal.”
Accolades like these signal that 28-year-old James is a writer to watch. But despite this praise, James admits she's still nervous about her novel's April 21 release.
“In the writing process I think about audience, but an audience that agrees with me,” she said with a laugh. “Now it's just a whole different set of conversations. I'm anxious.”
“Atlas of Unknowns” tells the story of Linno and Anju, two girls raised in India by their father and grandmother after their mother's mysterious death. The novel follows Anju's experiences in America, where she ends up after landing a scholarship to a prestigious school in New York — a scholarship she betrays her sister to win.
Meanwhile, Linno begins to blossom back in Kerala, rejecting a wealthy blind suitor and using her artistic gifts to make her own success. But when Anju goes missing, Linno's life is thrown off track and she's determined to get to America to find her sister.
“Family is just a wonderful theater for fiction,” said James, who has two sisters. “There's just so much conflict and resentment and antagonism and all of this is co-existing with love.”
Straddling worlds
Born in Chicago, James moved to Louisville with her family when she was 5. She said she lived an “insular” life growing up in Louisville's East End suburbs, never really fitting in when she tried to hang out in arty, bohemian neighborhoods like the Highlands.
“I enjoyed growing up in Louisville, but I always felt like the vibrant parts of Louisville were beyond my reach,” she said. “I remember this stretch of Bardstown Road with quirky, beautiful shops and trying to appear nonchalant when I went inside of them.”
But going to Grateful Threads to buy a hemp ring was a big deal and, “going inside Ear X-tacy would throw my internal systems into flux.” she said.
Being shy and self-conscious eventually led James to turn inward, and turn to writing. And she later discovered that feeling like you don't fit in has its advantages.
“It's actually a very good vantage to have as a writer, being a little bit on the outside of things,” she said. “I appreciate details in a different way and the city, this city in particular, in a different way than I think I would have if I felt I fit in.”
Jordan Pavlin, vice president and senior editor at Alfred Knopf, the book's publisher, cited James' ability to write fluently about two very diverse cultures.
“I really felt that Tania was one of those writers who was able to write as both an insider and an outsider,” Pavlin said. “She reminded me of a lot of the writers today who straddle worlds.”
“Atlas of Unknowns” follows one sister's tumultuous journey in America and another's coming of age story in India.
In the novel, Kumarakom, in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, is a growing town that's quickly becoming more modern, much to the dismay of the girls' grandmother. A changing Kumarakom is one that James has witnessed in real life on her visits to the area with her family. (Both her parents are from Kerala.)
“I think what I noticed more and more as I visited was the way in which tourism is much more present,” she said. “Seeing billboards around and seeing the way in which it's being drawn into a more modernized, globalized world — that's certainly interesting to me and also the visual poetry of the place.”
A rapidly changing town is the perfect backdrop for a story of a family going through a transformation of its own.
Though James has lived in America her whole life — she now calls New York home — she takes on the task of looking at the city and the country as a foreigner, as someone like Anju, who comes to America looking for a promise land only to find something much more complex.
“I like the idea of writing about someone who does have preconceived notions about what America is based on television and stories that have been told to her,” James said. “I wanted to write about somebody who comes to New York and observes it from the perspective of someone who has all these expectations and a lot of those expectations get turned around.”
James hopes, however, that the story will in some ways transcend place.
“I think that all good fiction, if it's doing its job, makes you somewhat aware of someone else's life, someone who might not have anything in common with you,” she said. “A farm boy in Kansas falling in love is not that different from what a guy in Kerala might be feeling when he first falls in love, that first thrill and excitement. That sense of universality, I think, is what fiction makes the reader aware of. What I would hope my book does is create that sense of understanding for someone who may not have a lot of common with the reader.”
Despite being drawn to writing early on, it would be a while before the thought of pursuing writing as a career would cross James' mind. The seed was planted during her days at the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts when she was a student at the affluent Kentucky Country Day School. She confessed that the reason she wanted to be part of the program was because she figured it would look good on her résumé. But that changed when she was introduced to African-American writers like the noted poet Frank X Walker.
“I had a really strong preconceived notion about what a writer looked like and that didn't include them and it certainly didn't include someone like me,” James said. “But I think that experience made me think about the possibilities of being an artist and writer and made me think about possibilities in my own life outside of that which I had expected for myself.”
Walker recalled being shocked by James' command of language.
“I remember how quiet and shy she was initially,” he said. “And then, when I first heard her work in class, it seemed impossible that such a refined voice could come out of somebody so young and so quiet.”
Today, James considers Walker one of her life-long mentors. Walker calls James a dream student.
“Her writing has matured and surpassed even our grandest wishes,” he said. “I'm going to get enough courage to take credit for what she's become, but I feel embarrassed even thinking about it, because she was so good when we first met.”
Natural-born storyteller
After graduating from Kentucky Country Day, James went on to study filmmaking at Harvard University but never lost her itch to write fiction. She would eventually go to Columbia University for a master's of fine arts in writing.
“I think I've always been pulled toward writing,” James said. “It's the territory in which I feel comfortable enough to take major risks and excited by. It's just what I want to do when I wake up in the morning.”
James' father is a doctor, as is her older sister, who practices in Cleveland. Her younger sister is studying to be a doctor at the University of Louisville. Yet when James announced she had different plans, her father was “overwhelmingly supportive” she said. “He was always a reader, a really avid reader of classical literature.”
Initially, her mother worried about her choice.
“I would describe my mother as ‘anxiously supportive' in those days and now, simply supportive,” James said. “She grew up as a great lover of books, like my father, but having never met a writer herself, I think the idea of her daughter becoming a writer was too remote to fathom.”
Now that she's older, however, James said she knows her mother was right to worry.
“When my own child someday declares to me that she wants to be a professional bungee jumper, karmic justice will be had,” she said with a laugh.
Englander and others have called James a “natural-born storyteller.” Despite the number of doctors in her family line, you could say it's in her blood. “We come from a storytelling family,” James said. “When we get together, people trade stories.”
In fact, “Atlas of Unknowns” grew out of a haunting story her father told her one Christmas season when the family was visiting Kerala. Setting off fireworks at Christmastime is a tradition in Kerala, but one year, her father told her, a boy he knew lost some of his fingers and suffered severe burns when some fireworks exploded in his hand.
“The trauma of that moment, flipping from extreme excitement to extreme shock — that image stayed with me,” James said. “I just kept writing that scene over and over again.”
Through these drafts James began to sketch out a family around this tragic event.
“I didn't know who the characters were yet, but through every draft I finally figured out who those people were and their relationships to each other,” she said. “But it took the whole novel to figure out who they were in a more profound way. I try not to think too much about who people are before I start the writing process, because I do feel it's in the process of writing that a character gets discovered.”
Like the story from which it blossomed, “Atlas of Unknowns” takes the reader on an emotional rollercoaster, said Pavlin of Alfred Knopf. “It's joyous and heartrending.”
The book, Pavlin said, made her laugh out loud and brought her to tears. She was struck by James' ability to surprise at every turn and move along the plot in a way that seemed effortless.
“It combined brilliant comedy with a genuinely heartbreaking mystery, and also a very powerful story about human striving, the wish for a better life,” Pavlin said.
No time to stop now
Now James is preparing for a book tour, which will include two stops in Louisville and appearances along the East Coast.
James has a second book in the works, a collection of short stories set in Louisville. But after being caught in a whirlwind of work preparing for the release of her novel, she admits that she needs a break.
“I am trying to work on stories, but I'm also trying to paint my apartment,” James said. “There's a bike marathon in New York that I kind of want to do, that I probably will enter and then drop out, but I have all these plans to actually exercise again. I want to do something that requires minimal thought.”
