‘The Alice Project’ scours millennial life like most books of the genre. And that isn’t a bad thing

A month after reading The Alice Project, I wondered why more people weren’t writing about it. It can’t be that everyone was procrastinating writing a review for a book that they couldn’t help
quickly thumbing. Or maybe the publicists didn’t send the copies on time, and now it’s too late. But then I reread the book, just as quickly as the first time I read it, and I realised why: There’s nothing new to say about it. You can read a review about Sally Rooney instead – it would’ve been the same. That’s because Gade doesn’t say anything new. But oh, I’ve to warn you. Contrary to what this paragraph might suggest: This is a positive review.

Relatable predictability

If you want to know what happens in the book, just read the blurb. Although the blurb shouldn’t give you the plot, the back cover of The Alice Project does exactly that. No, it’s not Gade’s editor or marketing team’s fault; it reflects the narrative’s capacity. It says, This book is predictable, and that’s why you should read it, promising nothing more. Or less.

Alice’s greatest pleasure in life is hanging out with his friends Nitin, Iyengar and Bakchod, mostly at the chai shop outside their old college. He has a job he doesn’t hate, friends he likes, and a life that is vaguely happy. Sure, it might be time for him to embrace adulthood, and yes, he can’t quite visualise his future clearly, but none of these concerns are big enough to push him out of his comfort zone.

Until a series of events – the death of a college friend, a budding romance – start to shape his personal life, and Alice is forced to reckon with the fact that his life will change, whether he wants it to or not.

You know how this story will go, especially if you’re a millennial. I asked ChatGPT to give me a one-liner description of most novels about millennials: “[Most millennial novels explore] the complexities of modern life for millennials, from navigating relationships and careers to grappling with social media and self-identity in the digital age.” The AI isn’t wrong. Gade’s novel does this through a two part structure divided into Winter and Summer. Although he never directly tells us in which year he positions his characters, their actions give us an estimate: Bakchod, a handsome and incessant but smooth talker, uses Skype to talk to his long-distance girlfriend, Neha. Another friend Nitin twists his front camera to take a picture of a drunk Bakchod, with him and Alice in the frame, and the novel tells us, almost like a grandfather recounting history, “A year later, they would start referring to [the picture] as a selfie.” And Alice and Snidgha, his eventual girlfriend, have to exchange numbers to flirt, not slide into Instagram DMs. But the most pre-Facebook characteristic of them all: They have a meet-cute. This was Winter. Or Book 1.

But Book 2 (or Summer) suggests Gade knows he’s not writing for a pre-Facebook readership. Book 1 ends on a sappy note, one that would’ve been hard to swallow if Gade had left it at that. Both books have the same beginning: Alice wakes up unfashionably, at a late hour, with a friend ready to launch at him with retorts. Except, in Book 2, it’s a different friend. Alice’s friends operate as a stopper to the reckoning that things change, presenting themselves as a perpetual source of nostalgia that doesn’t let him move on. However, this need for nostalgia doesn’t stem from changes in his life but that of his friends: Some get married and have kids, and his ex-girlfriend, whom he cannot (and refuses to) forget, goes abroad, changing his everyday functioning. Book 2 is an antithesis to Book 1 – a percolation of his fears.

Inevitably existential adulting

An existential undertone seeps into the novel through interludes of conversations with Javed, Alice’s older friend whose maturity doesn’t speak for his age. A PhD candidate with wealthy parents and a housekeeper, Javed has the time to read all the philosophy and spurn out theories Alice confesses he can only listen to when he’s high. Javed also seems to operate as an additional inner circle for Alice. (If you were to draw a Venn diagram of Javed, alcohol and weed, and Bakchod, Nitin, and Padma – Alice’s friend and Nitin’s girlfriend in Book 1 and wife in Book 2 – Alice would fit into that slot where they connect.)

Gade underlines Alice’s emotional dependency on his friends in the two Books, taking notes from the sitcom tradition where all the characters are involved in each other’s life to a point where you wonder if they at all spend time alone. The novel admits to this similarity, comparing Alice’s life to a “sitcom drama”. And like in television, Gade’s prose adapts to the “seven years later” frame within which Gade situates Book 2 by incorporating text messages into the midst. No, it’s not experimental writing, but by fitting into the norm, he proves that tropes become tropes because they resonate with the readership. It’s not a divine birth: it’s a careful curation mediated by cultural and historical context.

The Rooney effect

Gade’s project, excuse the pun, resonates with Rooney’s, reflecting the societal norms, values, and beliefs of the Indian millennial. (Not of the Gen-Z’s and definitely not that of someone from a marginalised community). By serving as a contemporary to Rooney, Gade calls attention to what stories our generation craves and what stories they hate themselves for enjoying at a time when even a sliver of political apathy seems intolerable. Rooney’s writing unspools modern relationships through sharp prose, drawing a raw narrative that forces you to read quickly.

But to call her a writer who wades through today’s politics would entail limiting “politics”to the mundane. Becca Rothfeld, one of Rooney’s many critics, writes in The Point, “When Connell [from Rooney’s Normal People] tells Marianne [Connell’s love interest] that he was late to coffee because there was a protest about “the household tax or something”, Marianne replies, “Well, best of luck to them. May the revolution be swift and brutal.” Then she and Connell get back to their convoluted relationship and their cappuccinos.” This is all that Alice and his friends do as well, but switch cappuccinos for hot spicy chai.

Perhaps it’s wrong to place the expectation to write from a specific modality on all writers of this era. Whether the Twitter activists like it or not, some secretly enjoy reading about romance and existential crises. Having The Alice Project on the bookshelf of 2023 makes you question whether it has to be a guilty pleasure.

The Alice Project, Satwik Gade, HaperCollins India.