An associate professor of English at Harvard, Tara Menon teaches Humanities 10, a yearlong Great Books course for first-year students, as well as popular courses on fictional narratives set in cities and nineteenth-century literature. Her first academic monograph, Speaking Parts, will be published this September by Princeton University Press. Her debut novel, Under Water, was published in March by Riverhead Books.
The novel is set against the backdrop of two natural disasters, and the narrative is split into two separate timelines. In one, best friends Marissa and Arielle live together in Phuket, Thailand, before the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami strikes and tragedy ensues. The other, picking up almost eight years later, follows a lonely, grieving Marissa who is now living in New York as the city prepares for Hurricane Sandy.
Earlier this year, Menon discussed Under Water with Harvard Magazine. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did the central relationship of Under Water come to you?
I knew relatively early that I wanted to write about female friendship. My first (failed) dissertation was an attempt to write about nineteenth-century British novels that passed the Bechdel test—that is, novels featuring at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man. It turned out to be difficult to write that dissertation because so few of those novels pass the test! Under Water is an effort to write a novel that does.
Of all the natural disasters you could have chosen, what made you want to write about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Sandy?
In 2004, when the tsunami hit, I was a teenager living in Singapore. It was Boxing Day, right in the middle of Christmas holidays, and in a typical year, my family and I would have been on holiday in Thailand. For some reason, which I can’t remember, we were not there that year. The tsunami killed a quarter of a million people; people at my school lost a sibling, a parent. The tsunami has haunted my imagination since.
In 2012, I was a graduate student at NYU when Hurricane Sandy hit. I sheltered at home, on the Upper West Side: we never lost power; school was cancelled; we had every possible comfort. It felt like a holiday. In the aftermath, I volunteered in Chinatown distributing basic goods to residents living on the upper floors of public housing buildings. I was struck by the disparity between downtown powerless life and uptown brunch fun. But I also found myself thinking deeply about differences in natural disaster response and relief, and thinking back to questions about the tsunami that I didn’t ask at the time.
Under Water’s opening quotes Rachel Carson, the groundbreaking writer and conservationist. What can novels like yours reveal about climate change?
I think of this novel partly as a riposte to the genre known as “cli-fi”—i.e., dystopian, apocalyptic, futuristic fiction. In many of these books, climate change is imagined as something that will happen in the near or distant future, and when it does, it will be total and spectacular. I wanted to write a different kind of climate change novel, one that shows climate change not as a future certainty but instead as a past and present truth. Some of my biggest inspirations in writing about the environment were non-fiction writers like Rachel Carson.
Also, I wanted to present irreversible, ruinous human-induced changes as mundane and quotidian. Both the New York and Thailand timelines move toward the two large-scale (and spectacular) natural disasters, but I place those at the end of the novel so I could focus on capturing the slow, gradual, often invisible changes to local ecosystems—what writer Rob Nixon called “slow violence.”
I also hope that Under Water can be read as a response to the writer Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant work of criticism, The Great Derangement, which argued that politics and culture, including literature, have failed to address the enormity of the climate crisis. I hope that the novel might even be seen as what Ghosh said (in 2016) doesn’t, but should, exist: serious literary fiction that captures both the freak event and the mundane truth of climate change..
The theme of loss—both natural and personal—is very present throughout the novel: Marissa, the narrator, is lonely and constantly grieving. Why did you write a novel about grief?
One of the most profound experiences of my college life was reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam in a class at Columbia. The poem (which I think is the greatest poem of the nineteenth-century) is about Tennyson’s grief for his friend Arthur Hallam. I was mesmerized by it, by how seriously it took grief for a friend, and how difficult it has been (and still is) for readers of the poem to believe that Tennyson and Hallam were just friends. Tennyson led me to the other great writers of grief—Auden, Lewis, Didion, Hardy—but most of them wrote about lovers. What if, I thought, a woman felt consumed by grief for a friend, just like Tennyson? What would that feel like, what would that look like? How could you capture that in a novel instead of a poem?
What are you working on next?
I am working on both a second academic book and a second novel. My academic book is an exploration of anger and the novel. I have noticed that readers often label books “angry”—they might say, for instance, “Jane Eyre is a furious book” or “Naipaul’s novels seethe with rage,” but it’s never been clear exactly how they make those determinations. In my book, I ask: what does it mean for anger to be embedded in a novel, rather than simply expressed by one of its characters? What are the formal characteristics of anger in fiction?
My next novel is about a nature documentarian and a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor who were childhood friends and meet again as adults in London.
