Real Life Is (Not) Boring

D’Souza’s Whiteman won the 2007 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second novel, The Konkans (Reviews, Oct. 15), explores a contemporary Indian-American family struggling with the pride and pain of their Goan heritage.

This feels like a very personal book. Is the material close to home?

Oh, yeah, for sure. It held me back at first. The book comes out in February and sometimes I have these panic attacks: I mean, my family is going to read this! But it’s not a fictional memoir. I do draw on stories from real life, but real life itself is boring. Or not boring but—

You can’t just copy it down on the page?

Right. I actually did a lot of research for this book and had a bigger picture in mind than just telling my family story... issues of colonialization, inherited guilt. I’m really excited about making people aware of a group they didn’t know anything about.

Did you feel close to your Konkan side as a kid?

I grew up hearing Konkan stories, eating Konkan food, hearing Konkan language. I didn’t always feel at home in my neighborhood in Chicago. But then I went to India when I was 19, thinking it would be a kind of homecoming, and it was definitely not a homecoming. The taxi driver said welcome home and then drove around the city for an hour with the meter running when my hotel was a block away.

Whiteman was so well received. Did you feel pressure to avoid a sophomore slump?

Yeah, that was part of it. Whiteman was a dream come true, and the reviews were so positive. And then suddenly I was getting into magazines, Playboy, the New Yorker. It was crippling in a way, but important to go on that roller-coaster ride. It was a tough year after Whiteman. I went through 14 months of drought, just one story, one poem. I was really frustrated, so I took some time off and then one night, boom, the first line of The Konkans came to me. It was a tough book emotionally, but once it got its legs, I was consumed, working 10, 12 hours a day.

Are you working on anything now?

I’m about halfway through another novel, but I’m thinking of putting it down for a bit. My two books have some pretty dark stuff in them. And I read The Road recently, which was great, but it fed some of my fears about the state of the world. I think I’d like to lighten up my palette, find the moments of humor in the darkness.