The Konkans, By Tony D'Souza

Poignant but clichéd study of how it feels to be an outsider

The Konkans, as the narrator of Tony D'Souza's second novel tells us nearly two-thirds of the way into the book, are a tiny Catholic people who live on the western coast of India in a "sea of Muslims and Hindus". They were converted to Catholicism in the 16th century and see themselves, amid the bewildering variety of India, somewhat as outsiders. They are, the narrator's mother tells him, the Jews of India.

As the narrator, Francisco D'Sai – his father a Konkan, his mother an American – explains, the Konkans' history of colonisation "leaves them favourably disposed to Europeans". In the welter of contemporary fiction about India, the Konkans have so far gone pretty much unrepresented. D'Souza's frequently funny, sometimes poignant novel slips into the vacuum.

It tells the story of the D'Sai family, several of whose members emigrate to Chicago in the 1970s. Francisco's mother, Denise, meets his father, Lawrence, while she is working for the Peace Corps in India. They marry (she so she can have for keeps someone who reminds her of India; he because he sees her as his passport to the US) and move to Chicago. There, the marriage built on these tenuous foundations flounders. Lawrence begins the process of reinventing himself into a stodgy, prosperous suburban American. Denise pines for India and perpetuates her connection to the land by having an affair with Sam, one of Lawrence's brothers, who follow him in pursuit of the American dream.

There is rich material here, but D'Souza does not mine it for all it is worth. The Konkans is complexly plotted, and the need to keep its machinations running comes at the cost of the novel's prose. Martin Amis once called Thomas Harris a "serial murderer of English sentences". D'Souza does not go so far, but he does consistently concuss his sentences with blows from clichés and lazy descriptions. Many of the India sections read like souped-up versions of a Lonely Planet guidebook.

The narrator himself is the other problem. It's hard to tell how Francisco knows so much about things that happened before he was born, or when he was very little. Not knowing how he knows (and tending to think that he can't, really) makes the novel, despite its swift pace and compassionate narration, often unpersuasive. But D'Souza's comic touch is assured, and, impressively, he never shies away from the big questions of migration, assimilation and reinvention.