Can we ever know a person’s true nature? How does appearance—what we can see and verify—relate to interior essence? Secrecy, identity, story, fate: these are the heady issues that engage Priscila Uppal in her latest novel, To Whom It May Concern.
The novel follows Hardev Dange and his three grown children as they negotiate their various identities and injuries. Hardev’s wife left him years earlier, after he became paralyzed in an accident. The kids have their own burdens, too: Dorothy is deaf, Emile is questioning his sexual identity and Birendra is fundamentally deceiving her fiancé.
Despite these fraught narrative elements, Uppal has not written a maudlin tale. She is far too sophisticated a writer to reduce her characters to a single characteristic. Instead, her book incorporates deafness, handicap and homosexuality, all within the broader experiences and relationships of her characters. Nor does this book become a mere...
Marianne Apostolides is a writer and critic based in Toronto. Her most recent novel, The Lucky Child, was published by Mansfield Press in 2010.
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