You Marry the Family
One of the oldest adages connected to the experience of marriage is that you aren’t just marrying the person, you are marrying the entire family. If an interested reader were to do an internet search for the title of this novel, one of the returns would lead to a 1959 Bollywood film sharing the exact same which is about also about this theme. (And that turns out to be just one of many Indian films sharing the same title and story which riffs on the same theme.) The adage applies across cultures, ethnicities, and nationalities, but one gets the very definite sense that this shared title is no mere coincidence. In cultures with a very long-established tradition of arranged marriages such as those on the Indian subcontinent and in various Islamic theocracies, the concept of marrying the entire family is less a simple adage and more of a genuine expectation in which the expectations may often materialize as a sense of dread. The engine driving this novel is the upcoming nuptials between Yasmin and Joe and the fuel additive to that engine is Yasmin’s anxiety over how well—or even if—the two families can blend together without incident.
The Secret of Lies
One of the consequences of the blending of family members as the result of marriage traces back to what has by this point actually become an old pop culture reference point: we are all separated by less than six degrees of Kevin Bacon. In other words, the more people you meet, the more likely it is that secrets from your past will suddenly become problematic in your present. At one point a character mentions that her father drinks and it is supposed to be a big secret except that her mother is merely pretending she doesn’t know and she herself pretends that she doesn’t know that her mother is pretending. These are the kinds of secrets composed of lies that continually pop up as a direct result of the upcoming marriage. The biggest of these secrets directly connects to the tradition of arranged marriages and the urge by some couples united in this way—whether out of rebellion or embarrassment or whatever—to pretend to the world that theirs is a marriage created from love rather than a pre-existing contractual agreement.
The Role of Fiction
Linked to the broader themes of how secrets and lies are often a necessary component for maintaining a happy balance among families is the fascinating decision by the author to introduce a much more narrowly pursued theme tangentially touching upon truth and deception. The subject of what role fiction plays in the modern world is addressed as a result of Joe’s mother, Harriet, being a popular writer. This naturally brings her into contact with other literary figures. A key insight into Yasmin is her unspoken confession that she always read fiction with a guilty conscience because it felt like wasting time that could be directed toward more productive pursuits. At the heart of conversations connected to this theme is the perception that fiction lack authenticity because it is philosophically just a lie and therefore it cannot be useful in preparing for the realities of life precisely because it lacks authenticity. Although it may not be immediately obvious, this theme is seamlessly integrated into the broader storyline of the wedding preparation as commentary on the widely held perception that an arranged marriage is not as authentic as a love-based marriage.
