The Quarter-Life Crisis
English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee
My parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers, perhaps can be credited with popularizing (if not inventing) the idea of the mid-life crisis, the moment of panic around age forty upon realizing that youthful potential has been replaced with adult actuality, with age, irrelevance, and loss looming in the near distance. I’m old enough to be eligible for a mid-life crisis, but I hope to avoid it. I went through the earlier, accelerated version: When I was in my early twenties, there were innumerable articles about the “Quarter-Life Crisis”, a then-new coinage for the disappointments of one’s first years of adulthood. A Google Trends search shows that the term first started gaining traction in 2002, when my age cohort was first entering the workforce.
Of course, those most vulnerable to a quarter-life crisis were educated, privileged kids who had been encouraged to think of themselves as full of untapped potential. Confronted with boring jobs, indifferent bosses, and grim apartments, separated from college friends, some of them wilted. I had my own version: I became very depressed in the first years of my adult career and nursed fantasies about quitting my boring tech job and moving to Montreal to write. I did the former, but not the latter.
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s melancholy comedy English, August has all the hallmarks of a quarter-life crisis novel, except instead of being about white western millennials, it’s set in 1988 amid the bureaucracy of the Indian Administrative Service. The title character, whose name is Agastya (nicknamed August), is a privileged, educated, but not particularly ambitious young man who finds himself contending with the overwhelming monotony and meaninglessness of his new government job.
In the opening chapters he arrives in the backwater town of Madna, where he’s been posted for training in district administration after getting a degree in English Literature. He finds the food dreadful (“the dal tasted like lukewarm chillied shampoo”), his coworkers corrupt and insipid, the administrative work an exercise in futility. Women are mostly absent, his colleagues reluctant to even mention their wives — “perhaps because to have a wife meant that one was fucking,” he notes.
He fumes at discovering where the path of least resistance has taken him:
Agasta was enraged at himself, for agreeing to the afternoon, for being in Madna, for a job that compelled him to be polite to Srivastav and his wife, for being in the job he was, for not having planned his life with intelligence, for having dared to believe he was adaptable enough to any job and circumstance, for not knowing how to change either, for wasting a life. He watched the chairs being arranged in rows and the tables being hidden by bedsheets, and couldn’t believe his future.
I’ve often found myself thinking of what I’ll ironically call its artistic subplot. In Agastya’s room at the boarding house for civil servants, there’s a dreadfully kitschy painting that he learns was created by a fellow bureaucrat. He’s moved, at first, to discover it, imagining its creator “not perhaps accustomed to creativity, but compelled to it by isolation… [he] had been lonely but had not given in, had recreated in his wilderness an image of home.” The painting makes Agastya feel hopeful that he’ll be able to make the best of his own situation. However, as he travels through the town and its environs, he encounters increasingly dreadful artworks by the same man, including a dumpy statue of Ghandi with a rod coming out of its ass to prop it up. Soon, the works of Tamse, Deputy Engineer, become a symbol of mediocrity, incompetence, and waste — “creativity,” then, does not offer an escape.
Although he first came to Madna armed with Keith Jarrett cassette tapes, a diary, and a copy of Marcus Aurelius to occupy himself, Agastya soon finds that rather than engage his mind, he desires oblivion most of all — not death, but the comfort of not having to seriously consider the problem of his life, “how to crush the restlessness in his mind”:
His father and Dhrubo had prophesied that the experience of Madna would prove educative, but all that his mind seemed to have learnt was the impotence of restlessness. He had begun to be appalled by thought, thoughts that scurried in his mind uncontrollably, like rats in a damp cavern, thoughts without action.
In the novel’s comic sections, he copes instead in all the classic ways of the slacker. He smokes pot, masturbates, finds ways to irritate his bosses, and avoids work as much as possible. He fantasizes about quitting the service, returning to the city, and taking a job as a journalist, but the thought of the commute throws him into a kind of despair that should be recognizable to anyone who has ever relied on public transit:
Nine every morning, he’d be rushing for a bus, lunch packet or tiffin carrier in hand, he’d queue up sweating at the bus-stop, but still stand all the way, in the stench of engine oil and bus-sweat, like the stench of that antibiotic capsule he had had in Madna when he’d been ill. And his questions would contract to whether he would be able to catch his most convenient bus, and whether he would get a seat on it; and the bus timings would be down on a slip of paper in his table drawer and would be embossed in his mind; any unannounced change in them would be cataclysmic, and his wonderful days would be those on which he got a seat both ways.
Of course, through the course of the story, Agastya is able to mature through confrontations with the “real world,” through scenes of violence, squalor, and spiritual grace. One darkly funny moment occurs when he visits a serene, well-funded home for lepers that has managed to avoid becoming entangled with the IAS. He sees a landscape painting hung on the wall and, admiring its quality, notes its superiority to the works of Tamse — and is then informed that it was done by a patient who, having lost all his fingers to leprosy, painted it with his toes.
The brief author bio at the end of the NYRB edition notes that Chatterjee continues to work for the Indian Administrative Service, writing novels “on the side” and enjoying “diverse, solitary occupations.” The bio does not mention any of his literary prizes, which include the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. These few facts suggest he was able to come out of his quarter-life crisis, if he had one, more or less intact.
Perhaps you’ll enjoy one of my other pieces on mid-life-crisis literature: