Los Angeles Review of Books Conversation: Love and Critique

OVER THE LAST few years, we’ve seen several second-generation Indian American coming-of-age stories emerge, but few that fuse magical realism and social satire more smartly than Sanjena Sathian’s debut novel, Gold Diggers. Gold Diggers tells the story of Neil Narayan, a teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs who doesn’t share the same drive as his peers. He falls for his neighbor, Anita, whose family has been brewing a magical potion out of gold, a potion that represents the ambition of the gold’s original owner. The second part of the novel fast-forwards a decade, to Silicon Valley in 2016, where Neil and Anita team up for a gold heist.

This is a coming-of-age story that explores questions of identity and the uber-competitive culture that runs rampant in Indian American communities. It’s a theme Sathian is familiar with — and the author has followed the creative advice to write what she knows. Like her character Neil, she’s also an Indian American who grew up in the Atlanta suburbs. “There was something to be said about the places that I felt like I came from,” Sathian says, “these suburbs that seem to have no character but actually turned out to have this kind of bustling life in basements and in kitchens — just these like really unsexy places that actually do harbor a lot.”

Sathian’s initial conception of the novel was what she describes as “somber realism,” and she felt she was writing the kind of book she thought “a serious Brown writer was supposed to write.” It lacked playfulness, Sathian explains. So eventually, she began including more magic and science-fictional elements and thus found a new way into the old material. Even before the book’s publication in April, it generated buzz from Hollywood: Mindy Kaling’s production company has announced that it will adapt Gold Diggers for TV, with Sathian set to co-write.