Optional Practical Training
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
* SHORTLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION 2025 FIRST NOVEL PRIZE *
An elegantly inventive debut novel that offers a sharp new take on the immigrant story in post-9/11 America
Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience—a period known as Optional Practical Training—so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel—to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT—looking for a room to rent, starting her job—she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.
Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Sunder's astute and stimulating debut novel (after the collection Boomtown Girl), an Indian woman reckons with racial prejudice and draconian immigration laws in post-9/11 America. It's 2006 when Pavitra graduates from college in the U.S., hoping to extend her stay as long as possible. She's hired to teach math and physics at a Massachusetts private school where she hopes to receive a work visa and buy time to finish her novel, a pursuit considered "frivolous" by her parents and relatives back home in Bangalore. As Pavitra grapples with the weight of her family's expectations, she realizes that her acquaintances in America also carry preconceived notions about her. For example, her white landlord assumes, for the sake of his own comfort, that she's a member of the Brahmin caste. In conversations with her friends, Pavitra examines what it means to be perceived as a person of color ("The term ‘of color' struck me as ridiculous. Only in America, it seemed to me, would people coin such labels as ‘person of color' and ‘legal alien' ") and grapples with other unique aspects of American culture, such as the prizing of "an individual's opinions." In a striking climax, Pavitra confronts the limits of what she's been promised by the school and of her ability to move freely between the U.S. and India, and the novel coheres into a crystalline portrait of a woman straddling cultures and expectations while attempting to discover who she is. It's a knockout.
