Cut out all the ropes and let me fall

It hadn’t really happened at all.

It was all just a dream.

But I know it happened.

What can anyone know, really?

ever

and I am here now,

and it is over it is hot and dusty

It happened. It happened and I am here now.

Twenty Pounds of Flesh

July 2013

Books

Style Over Matter, and What Could Have Been

By P.Rossett

Published: 28 July 2013

Tara Mullick obviously wants her fi rst novel to debut with a bang. Mullick and her publishers have pulled out all the stops to ensure that Frequencies creates a strong buzz with its arrival. The requisite ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘this is a seminal representation of our times’ sound bites have been garnered and shouted about by PR personnel, and Mullick herself sold as a bright new star in the world of pretentious pop fiction.

So what’s all the fuss about?

In Frequencies, Mullick loosely traces the process of her self-imposed conformation to American culture and the subsequent sense of detachment from her own roots. She goes from leading a sheltered, joint-family life in Kolkata to drinking and doing drugs while at college in America. It is not a new story, but she filters it via an emphasis on run-of-the-mill existentialism and a foggy relationship with a globe-trotting billionaire whose affectations she idolizes. Mullick relegates the postcolonial aspect of her story to the background, keeping her protagonist focused outside the shifting cultural scenery around her. In effect, the treatment of immigration back and forth as a foregone, comfortable conclusion for the affl uent youth of a New India says more about the world she lives in than the novel itself.

It has to be said that at least Mullick is a ballsy writer. Relentlessly self-referential, this postmodern pastiche of all that is popular highlights her Generation Z sensibility in spades, lathering the book with an endless array of allusions ranging from Virginia Woolf to The Killers to Bon Iver (the latter’s Justin Vernon features briefl y as a dreamlike character of sorts). Think a literary version of the pop culture-heavy music of Lady Gaga, and you get an idea of the overtly declarative, yet frequently vacuous, nature of Mullick’s style.

The biggest flaw of Frequencies—and this is a deeply flawed novel—is that it tries to do too much, in too many ways, and ends up barely grazing the surface of any of the myriad issues Mullick addresses. Pontifications on everything from bar-hopping to sex to life itself, and flirtations with religion and the communist politics of West Bengal are just that—minor flirtations that flit by without ever delving into the meat of any matter.