Brannavan Gnanalingam’s new satire obliterates the myth of the good immigrant. Shanti Mathias reviews it. 

The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is Wellington author Brannavan Gnalingam’s latest novel, and it’s very Wellington. It’s narrated, in the first person, by the eponymous Kartik Popat, whose parents are Indian by way of Zimbabwe. Nearly dux of his private Hutt Valley school, he studies film and accounting at Victoria University and dreams of making a properly weird auteur film, telling the story of one single character from multiple perspectives. His path changes when he joins the Wellington debating team, ostensibly to sleep with hot law students. 

Instead, he meets political types and gets a job with “the Party”, with bizarre names (a character that strongly resembles Don Brash is called Donkey Don, a character like John Key is “Big Boss”) and exact dates revealing that this is very much a satire of Wellington’s political classes, especially the National Party, over the last quarter century. Popat starts by leveraging the power of Facebook to share ridiculous videos, then begins to be a “political assassin”, helping get rid of low-tier MPs the party is sick of. He ignores the frequent racism directed at his brown skin, and doesn’t think too hard about the morality of what he’s doing. 

When he’s rejected by the party in 2020, towards the end of the novel, Popat goes online and finds connection, instead, in vaccine-skeptical, conspiracy-inclined people. No longer embedded in the power of the National party, he instead derives a sense of influence from selling people pills to cure Covid. He’s far down the rabbit hole, though he got there cynically; the project of the novel is to discover if it is possible for Popat to dig himself out.

In both tone and content, this novel is very different from Gnanalingam’s acclaimed Sprigs, about a sexual assault perpetrated by a rugby team at a private boys school. As narrator, Popat writes in long, breathless sentences, always first person. This, more than anything else, serves to characterise his protagonist; Popat can connect anything to anything, he thinks fast and fluidly, and uses that skill for the Party without remorse. 

While it’s focused on a single person, rather than a cast of characters, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat has in common with Sprigs Gnanalingam’s interest in the Hutt. What is it like to come from a place that at times only seems to exist to shuffle people towards Wellington? Popat replaces the insularity and pursuit of status for a similarly insular parliament, where people are more interested in protecting their own power than executing the responsibilities of their office. Who does power serve? Mostly just those already in power, which means politicians, yes, but also their rich donors and their staff. 

There’s much to enjoy in this novel for anyone who has paid attention to New Zealand politics in the last decade. In the 2014 election, Popat makes a joke about how the opposition is like a rowing team all trying to row in different directions; given the way people in politics routinely steal each other’s ideas, it’s impossible to read the passage without hearing the beat of ‘Eminem Esque’. Gnanalingam, who very obviously knows lots of people working in different parts of New Zealand’s small beltway, is interested in the day-to-day reality of making political decisions. How did the Dirty Politics reveals feel to a cynical National staffer? What was the shift to being in opposition like after the long years under Key? 

This grates, at times, when the prose is excessively online, although I understand this to be a product of Popat’s time in the internet trenches. “Voters just thought everyone sucks here,” says Popat of the 2014 election, using the phrase from the Reddit page ‘Am I the Asshole’. At times the prose is clunky and I didn’t always find it easy to read, although perhaps that is because Popat’s actions are often despicable, liking the security of a job and not caring what he has to do to keep it.

As a product of independent, collectivist press Lawrence and Gibson, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is decidedly weird. As I read I felt grateful that ever-evolving writers like Gnanalingam have a vehicle like this to publish their work, whether that is Gnanalingam’s domestic thriller Slow Down, You’re Here, or the social realism of Sprigs, or the climate migration novel Sodden Downstream. It’s to New Zealand literature’s benefit that Gnanalingam can revisit his themes of power, inequality, precarity, anger and migration in so many different registers.

Perhaps the most moving scene in The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is when Popat attends a gathering at the Tamil Association, even though “Sri Lankan Tamils historically didn’t tend to vote for the Party because they were originally let in by Labour in the ‘80s, although maybe there was hope because that Labour Government did a terrible job in letting their wider families in (well, actually that was Immigration, and they just didn’t believe in doing anything).” By now a ministerial advisor, Popat’s wilful ignorance of South Asia is revealed as he wonders if Eelam, the Tamil name for Sri Lanka, is in fact Gerry Brownlee’s electorate, Ilam. Popat is completely blindsided by the attendees’ lack of interest in his empty jokes about South Asian solidarity and their bleak anger at the New Zealand government’s refusal to even condemn the massacres perpetrated during the Sri Lankan civil war. Instead of the transactional relationships of politics, Popat sees what a more authentic community looks like: laughter and teasing, masala thosai and eggplant curry. “I was back to being irrelevant, like I was in high school,” he thinks, and leaves – not considering that perhaps much of his work is irrelevant, empty lines for the benefit of politics he doesn’t really care about. 

Is this a cynical book? I was struggling, as I read, to decide. On one hand, Popat is a profoundly cynical character, willing to spend his time doing what he is told without thinking of the consequences beyond his own wellbeing. He sleeps with wealthy Party donors then hands their cheques to his bosses; he recruits a very online Indian-origin man to help run a conspiracy party, then abandons him when their party gets none of the vote. 

But a recurring note in the novel reveals that Gnanalingam isn’t simply interested in excavating the cynicism of right-wing grifters. Popat only starts working for the “Party” when he wants to find a way to finance his film. But the work, empty though it is, distracts. At times in the novel, Popat watches films again, and remembers his desire to make a movie, a proper movie, called And Jack (an actual film that Gnanalingam made with friends in the early 2000s). When he is making the most money, selling vitamin pills he pitches as Covid cures, Popat thinks about spending it on investment properties, although most of it goes to sugar daddy relationships with 20-year-olds. “I never once thought I could have finally self-funded And Jack. That dream was now dead.” As a narrator, he doesn’t seem to recognise how sad it is for someone to have travelled so far from where they thought they wanted to go, and to have lost most of his opportunities for true connection with others in the doing. 

Gnanalingam is interested in how people like Popat, a son of migrants, can work utterly against the interests of their community, and ultimately, against themselves. In a piece for The Spinoff, he describes being inspired by Vivek Ramaswamy, perhaps the most prominent South Asian right-wing grifter. In the final part of the novel, Popat is the victim of a racially motivated attack. He feels real pain; his attackers don’t care what he’s said on the internet or who he has worked for. As the novel ends, Gnanalingam suggests that there is – not a redemption perhaps – but another chapter, even if it’s a tragic one. 

In the wake of Trump’s re-election, Gnanalingam’s ability is to write a narrative that is curious, or even empathetic, about where right-wing populism comes from. It is possible to understand how people like Popat contribute their labour to undermine the people they could consider their own community. But there’s more to these people than what they do, or what they believe. Empathy can’t fix everything, yet consigning people to only ever represent what they said online is a tragedy too. 

The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat by Brannavan Gnanalingam ($35, Lawrence & Gibson) is available to purchase at Unity Books.