One area of the book that might give readers pause is the representation of Sneha’s two most important relationships in the novel. The strength of Mathews’ beautiful prose shines through the more melodramatic moments, ultimately redeeming what might, in less capable hands, have been a cheesy or implausible result. It is both gratifying to see her experience this blossoming, and also perhaps just a bit too quixotic to feel fully satisfying. The final few chapters of the book are perhaps the least appealing precisely because some sentimentality does break through as Sneha grows up and learns to accept the love of her community. She reflects, as she ponders the disdain shown to her by her much more privileged friend Thom, that “it was the great desire of my heart to have the trapping of a bourgeois life, soft and warm as a cashmere sweater.” Growing up as the only child of an optimistic and ambitious family, Sneha hides her identity as a gay woman from her parents, fearing they will disappoint her, and carefully compartmentalizes her interactions with friends and potential love interests, sharing as little as she can and hoping that picking up the check at dinner will smooth over the disappointment her lack of intimacy might cause. Despite this idealistic perspective, most of the book avoids sentimentality through the frank and forthright voice of Sneha, a woman who often chooses to live in a state of emotional hell rather than express a single need. With the help of a fleshed-out cast of supporting characters who often contradict the negative views she holds of herself, Sneha gradually comes to recognize that community and solidarity are the way to survive life’s sling and arrows. Mathews skillfully navigates a slow-blossoming social and political awareness in the young Sneha, who angrily asks, “How was anyone expected to dream loftily about the future when the present ground them down to powder and nothingness?”

Despite trying to do everything right, she and her friends and family are faced, again and again, with injustice, petty tyranny, state violence, aggressions on both a micro and macro level. Sneha, the sometimes prickly female narrator, reflects on the state of her own life in mid-recession Milwaukee and the lives of those she grows to love.

In her novel All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews takes a stab at that reckoning. 9/11, repeated economic collapses, wars and fights over culture and identity, the encroaching existential threat of climate disaster in our lifetimes it seems a new mortal terror develops every few years, and many a “millennial novel” has attempted to reckon with that feeling of dread that hums in the background, warning you that something is wrong. To be a millennial is to be confronted, constantly, with the knowledge that things are not going well.

Sarah thankam mathews books