Ash Davida Jane
When I Open the Shop by Romesh Dissanayake (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 224pp, $35
Romesh Dissanayake’s When I Open the Shop is a strong first novel that shows a deft command of language and understanding of character. From the opening page the reader is pulled deep into the novel’s emotional world. The start of the novel places us just a few weeks after his mother’s death, with the as-yet-unnamed narrator having thrown himself into work at his newly opened noodle shop on The Terrace in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Dissanayake captures the tension between grief and the suffocating admin that piles up after a death, as the narrator is left solely responsible for organising the funeral and sorting through his mother’s house. Our way into understanding his character is by seeing how he responds to these pressures: by pushing away his feelings and focusing on preparing food.
Food is an evocative subject in this book, sometimes bringing back the spirit of his mother or his childhood, providing a way to connect with strangers, and giving him an anchor in the world. But Dissanayake regularly subverts the trend of writing about food to create a warm and wholesome environment or show positive connections. Cooking for his mother’s funeral is ‘like a catering gig’, something that places distance between him and the other attendees. As the book goes on, the carrot salad the narrator regularly prepares with the recipe his mother taught him takes on a sour taste that he can no longer stand. He grows embarrassed about it, this physical reminder of something missing in his connection with his mother’s memory. The moments focused on food are where Dissanayake’s pared-back, clean prose takes on a melodic beat, each step spelled out in order. The descriptions of washing and slicing vegetables, assembling ingredients and cooking rice are hypnotic and familiar, filled with the smells and textures of the kitchen.
A little under two-thirds of the way through When I Open the Shop, part two ends on a dramatic cliffhanger. Dissanayake will return to the narrator’s story, but for now, we’re taken somewhere else. ‘The Island’ is a 19-part narrative poem following characters Mantoo and Manone as they struggle against the elements on an unnamed island where they are seemingly the only two people. As a work in itself, this poem tells an interesting story, but it sits a little off-kilter against the primary narrative of When I Open the Shop. When we come back to the story an unspecified but significant amount of time has passed and there’s a tonal shift. Dissanayake introduces new characters and the dynamic has changed—we see the narrator, Devendra (only now given a name), as part of a social group, one of many moving parts, as opposed to the sole figure keeping everything moving by himself. It’s not immediately clear that the narrator in part three is the same person we’ve come to know in the first two parts; so much has changed. In real life, this character growth would be expected and admirable, but in fiction where we’re missing everything in between, it requires the reader to be willing to buy into it. This stylistic shift asks you to read with an open, curious mind, following the story where it goes without knowing exactly where you are. In giving the narrator a name at this late stage in the book, it’s as if the earlier version of him wasn’t quite fully formed. He didn’t need a name because he existed largely outside of the context of other people.
This shift would be more effective if Dissanayake’s writing in parts one and two weren’t so strong. Against the regular beat and minimal but striking voice of the first two-thirds, part three pales a little in comparison. Coming to this new chapter of Devendra’s story from ‘The Island’, it’s natural to want to read into their proximity. The two narratives do speak to each other, but in breaking the line of the primary narrative Dissanayake had an opportunity to do something that challenges the form of the rest of the book. Though only a small fraction (20 pages) of the book, the poem stands out in a way that could be really interesting. I wanted Dissanayake to push the boundaries further with this change in genre and stray away from narrative completely. It feels like the poem sits alongside the primary narrative, not intersecting but both on the same plane. I’m curious what would happen if instead it sat at odds to the primary narrative, disrupting its shape and subverting the idea of a chronological sequence of events as the main form of storytelling.
This isn’t the only place where Dissanayake brings in poetic elements. One chapter in each section of the novel starts with a handful of short lines broken at the beat that lead us into the prose. These almost repeat, with minor changes to indicate how things have changed since the last iteration. As ‘When I open the shop’ changes to ‘When I arrive at the shop’, it shows the biggest development over the course of the novel: Devendra is no longer doing long days at the shop, hustling mostly alone from dawn till late, just trying to make ends meet. He has a team of staff whom he likes and trusts, and he can stroll in after opening to see the place buzzing and full of happy punters. This short, sharp poetic style is clearly one Dissanayake is comfortable with—unsurprising, as shortly after the publication of When I Open the Shop, his debut chapbook of poems appeared in AUP New Poets 10. These four or five-line stanzas tell a whole story with just a handful of images, leaving no loose ends.
In its longer form, however, the plot sags a little with a lack of support in the middle. In jumping from the end of part two with Devendra lost (literally) and emotionally isolated and the business in dire straits to the beginning of part three, where the shop is thriving, and he is happy in a long-term relationship, we’re left wondering how we got there. Dissanayake does tell us, but it’s in brief, the abridged version of the story told after the fact. There’s something interesting about the choice to focus on the sunny third act, when things for the most part are resolved and happy, instead of the chewy, complex middle. Don’t get me wrong, the happy ending is worthwhile and good, but without the calorie-rich middle arc of how we got there, I’m left not fully sated at the end.
Where the third part of When I Open the Shop earns its keep is in the chapter ‘Anxestors in the glass’, which in a way is the crux of the book, distilled into an internal monologue of uncertainty, anxiety and grief over the fraught connection with his mother that culminates in the admission, ‘Really, all I was looking for was someone to hold me. Like she used to hold me.’ Then, the memories. Devendra’s mother teaches him how to make morkovcha, the (now) infamous carrot salad, which like him has gone unnamed up until this section. The memory, too, is fraught, details blurry and hard to grasp. However, there are the spirits of his ancestors, peeling and chopping along with them. They have a lot to say about the way the dish is prepared, how it differs from how they used to make it or how he’s messing up. Devendra’s doubts come down to this: to not living up to their expectations. He has to seem like he knows what he’s doing because they’re watching, and he doesn’t want to disappoint them. But in the end what really matters is that they are there with him in everything he does:
I am at the sink washing dishes.
I can feel my anxestors here with me.
My anxestors lift me up.
Each time I rinse, they all rinse.
Each time I scrub, they all scrub.
This chapter manages to perfectly capture the loneliness of feeling disconnected from your ancestors and of desperately wanting to earn their respect, combined with the loss that Devendra has spent years refusing to look directly at. Here, finally, we feel some of the tension he’s been carrying start to unravel as he acknowledges the built-up anger at his mother’s death: anger that so much was asked of him but nothing he could do was enough. As good writing about death often does, this is a moment that feels both unique and universally familiar. This chapter could be read as a standalone piece, it’s so strong, but it sits comfortably within the full context and makes for a beautiful emotional climax to the novel.
Dissanayake shows a lot of promise with this debut novel. While more time could have been spent developing the narrative threads, the prosody, voice and sense of character are enough to make it a compelling read. When I Open the Shop is a moving portrayal of coming-of-age through loss that will leave readers curious for more.
ASH DAVIDA JANE is a poet, editor and reviewer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Their second book, How to Live With Mammals (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), won second place in the Laurel Prize. They are a founding publisher at Tender Press and reviews co-editor at Takahē.
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