The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat
by Brannavan Gnanalingam

Now that we are living in the ‘weeks in which decades happen’, political satire seems largely unnecessary. Trump’s first inauguration eight years ago prompted Armando Iannucci himself to retire from political comedy. Yet amid the farcical second coming of Western fascism, there are still corners that have been left out of the clown show’s limelight. Asians (both kinds) have been selling out to the far right in the West for as long as Asians have been in the West. But where are they in the popular New Zealand novel? Whatever happened to Diverse Asian Representation?

Cue the return of Brannavan Gnanalingam from his extended sojourn in literary fiction, back to the wastelands of political satire. Gnanalingam’s The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is a bookend to his John Key-era SIS riff, A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse, which saw him described as New Zealand’s answer to Iannucci. 

The new novel was inspired by an infamous clip of MAGA techbro Vivek Ramaswamy being told to his face by Ann Coulter, on his own show, that she would never vote for him, explicitly because he was Indian, and implicitly, by the stunned look of recognition on his face in that moment, because he was a pathetic loser. Who is the version of Ramaswamy ‘fit for Aotearoa’? It was always going to be an even bigger loser.

Gnanalingam’s instantly iconic and deceptively clever thought-experiment The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat, connects endstate far-right disinfo Disgrasians with our classic Asian diaspora starting point of ‘what if I was a loser with no friends?’ Kartik Popat’s barely considered path of least resistance is a natural progression from unpopular, resentful and lazy child seeking access to the power and protection of white supremacy, to unpopular, resentful and lazy adult working for the National Party. Following the money, Popat rolls listlessly along the ideological spectrum into online extremism-grifting in the political wilderness of the Ardern years, to the 2022 Parliament riot and beyond, losing along the way his dreams of directing a movie, his ability to eat spicy food, and any possibility of genuinely liking or being liked by anyone.

The novel is funny in a way that a car crash is funny, depending on who is locked inside it, whether they die or not, and who they might have tried to blow up. As both satire and great horror should be, it’s effective because it’s too real. The extreme levels of cringe cause you to leave your body at times, not least during the excruciating sex scenes. The internalised racism is matter-of-fact and constant. ‘Befriending my fellow Indians would seem like I’d failed,’ says Popat. With enough sunblock, he hopes ‘there was a chance that people would mistake me for a far more desirable Brazilian or Southern Italian’.

At the moral centre of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is an Uncle Toby. In Kartik Popat there is only an Uncle Tom. Each chapter is named for a different New Zealand political memoir, unrelated to anything that happens in the chapter, and there is Shandy-level digression in the novel’s style of lengthy and banal run-on sentences that hedge around Popat’s objectionable positioning.

Popat’s sheer verbiage is moral insulation from the consequences of his own actions. He’s not debating anyone but himself, because in the end (and the beginning, and the middle), he has no real friends to talk to. His incoherent, defensive reflection upon the 2019 Christchurch attacks following his own promotion of the Global Compact on Migration conspiracy theory, is one place where he can at least feel the thinness of the insulation.

I obviously didn’t condone the killing of all those people, and a bunch of Indians got stuck in amplifying the anti-Muslim messages, which I had nothing to do with, and weren’t reflective of most Indians who were outraged like me, and of course, I didn’t condone, and no, I didn’t change my profile picture on Facebook, and sure, that guy deserved to go to jail for a really long time, and if he never comes out, great, and if he gets assassinated in jail, all good, but that didn’t justify all of the scrutiny everyday gun holders were getting, but then someone told me when I was on this soapbox at a party a few months later, that if I was walking down the street next to the mosque, he would have shot me, and I didn’t need to respond to such ugly speculation, and I wondered if I should have peroxided my hair to make it clear. I was cynical about it all, anyway, because those sorts of events were illusory in bringing the country together, because no-one really wanted to think too hard how quickly the death of a bunch of brown and black people could be forgotten, even one as young as that little kid with the big eyes.

I spent a good chunk of the latter half of 2019 drunk …

As well as political and moral tragicomedy, there are Asian community in-jokes, including Popat confusing the Sikh farmers’ protests with Groundswell, and his revealing boasts about a top-five 424 score in Bursary exams: his A-minus average, aka an Asian Fail, follows him all the way to the last sentence. The Asian tragicomedy arises because Popat is smart enough to identify that he should align with white people for survival, but not smart enough to figure out how to make real friends who might actually protect him. His gradual rise throughout the novel reflects only the greater incompetence and venality of others.

As ever, Gnanalingam’s on-the-tools portrayal of the Wellington political-media complex, and how its transactional cynicism moulds the susceptible into sociopaths, feels impeccably, scandalously, real. Also real – or sure, on-the-nose – is the way Popat’s life echoes the wider Asian diasporic experience in the West: he is deployed as a useful tool, a malleable body, ‘to run interference’ against the claims of the have-nots, but never to hold power, or to be recognised. Pimped out during National Party fundraisers, Popat’s reaction of being ‘surprised and pleased to feel wanted like that’ might be his most sympathetic moment.

The book’s hidden genre is the döppelganger/Dark Shadow ‘problematic other guy’ horror novel – Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Fight Club, or – most pertinently and recently – Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill and Rebecca Kuang’s Yellowface. I have a number of life-crossovers with Gnanalingam himself, and reading this novel gave me the feeling that Popat has dogged my own steps for decades. He is there at the 2004 protest against the National Front in Wellington for which I was the ethnic community organiser. He is there offstage riding out the Dirty Politics scandal while my friends were being quoted in Nicky Hager’s book and ensuing coverage. He puts up the petition about the Global Migration Compact later taken down by the National Party’s ‘emotional junior staffer’ we all shitposted about on Twitter, after reference to the Compact is found scrawled on the Christchurch shooter’s gun. He is in London brushing up on dead-cat Topham Guerin tactics and waxing cynical about the Grenfell fire, which I wrote about while working there for a human rights NGO.

Popat narrates his little life haunted by the other, happier Kartiks who might have been – the second-generation Asians who made friends with each other, who made art. They lived the same backstory beat for beat – the immigrant parents buying the abridged Shakespeare volumes, the school camp food trauma, the racism and exclusion in suburban deserts, the attempts to accumulate social capital via mastery of elitist cultural knowledge – but did not turn out to be fascists.

His dislike of other Asians leads to an instant hatred for a Sri Lankan Tamil woman film buff and writer, ‘the type of attractive South Asian girl who’d end up with an ugly white guy’. His online harassment campaign against her – during a bored unemployed period – launches Popat into the most disturbing phase of his career as an disinfo Covid grifter plumbing the most extreme reaches of the internet. On the nose? Or simply very accurate about the gateway between MRAsians, misogynist incel culture, and far-right violent extremism? Popat ‘could have just formed a film club with her at university and become a normal person, like the other at-risk-for-inceldom Asian dudes in the Lumière Reader scene of the mid-2000s’, a circle from which Gnanalingam himself sprang. But no, their paths diverged. Gnanalingam made his student film And Jack; Popat never did.

The character of Kartik Popat is most fixated on himself, labouring hard on his narrative self-containment. The eeriness of the book is in its banality, the hermetic completeness of this shadow-life blown in from The Other Timeline. Like Gnanalingam’s last novel, Slow Down You’re Here (2022), this is an Asian horror story, with Popat the ghostly, ghastly threat of our own self-hatred, that other guy within who we know will only destroy us.

Perhaps it’s a flaw not to extend the grace of understanding to an unreliable narrator through complex characterisation in a contemporary novel – but there is understanding. We understand him really well. We are from there! Gnanalingam has already won literary recognition for more humanist empathetic novels, and now he has allowed us our sealed moment of recognition, disgust, horror, rejection and – if we are lucky, if we are in the mood – laughter. There but for the grace of God and any sense of intellectual curiosity or human decency, or ability to connect to other people, go any of us.

And there he goes now – our little Eichmann of Wadestown.