[In the following excerpt, Bob highlights postcolonial identity issues explored in Manhattan Music.]

The issues of identity and cultural displacement are the core of Meena Alexander's novel Manhattan Music. She has assembled a large, urbane and angst-ridden international cast of artists, poets, business figures and academics, all partly shaped by terror and violence. The central figure, Sandhya Rosenblum, has come to America as the wife of a Jewish man and lost herself in the process. She drifts into an affair with an Egyptian post-doctoral scholar who is too numbed by the chaotic state of the world to provide her with real support. He explains this to her by drawing a comparison to Frankenstein's monster.

[I]mmigrants are like that. Our spiritual flesh scooped up from here and there. All our memories sizzling. But we need another. Another for the electricity. So we can live.

In contrast to Sandhya's helpless depression, her friend Draupati, an American-born performance artist (descent: mostly Indian, part African, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and a smattering of "low European"), is able to create meaning through her art, in which she represents and attempts to define the "Race-Ethnicity-Gender-CrossTalk thing."

That's what the book attempts to define, too, sometimes a little awkwardly. World events form a constant backdrop without affecting characters or plot. The Persian Gulf war begins, Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated, a bomb explodes in the World Trade Center, the Branch Davidians are incinerated. The characters respond with shock, or bemusement, or philosophical comments, as people do, but these events sometimes distract from the narrative, presented by various characters in fascinating mixes of present, past and dreamed experiences. When Sandhya's cousin, Jay, a globetrotting photographer, briefly encounters a deranged, bigoted Vietnam veteran, the madman's few lines of ravings make a more-pointed and poignant statement about the horrors of war and racism than handwringing recitals of atrocities and speculations about what the world is coming to.

The book suggests hope, through improved communication and technology, a global exchange of art, business, information and experience. Manhattan, the setting for most of the book, is used as a possible model for a polyglot, multicolored, CNN-informed society. "And mightn't one argue," someone says at a cocktail party, "that varied languages altered the structure of consciousness, made one better equipped for life in a world of multiple anchorages such as New York presented?" Sandhya's husband, a typically monolingual American, suggests it might be possible to live a worthwhile life with just one language. "Quite so," the speaker says, "but what of the … immigrant in Europe, in America? Who will learn their languages?" The speaker is writing a book on "post-colonial identity. New York City, of course, was the perfect place to put such a book together."

With Manhattan Music, Meena Alexander has written such a book.