Shashi Bhat's The Most Precious Substance on Earth (McClelland & Stewart, 2021) is a picaresque coming-of-age novel that starts strongly. It chronicles the youth of a South Asian high school student from Halifax named Nina after she experiences a sexual assault. It then jumps ahead to her experience of graduate school in creative writing at Johns Hopkins (Bhat's alma mater), a section that is particularly well-crafted.
Here, Bhat's descriptions are at their most acute. Describing a graduate of the program and published author who still shows up at events, Bhat's narrator offers the following: “In profile, his hair is a tilde” (90). Then, when this famous ex-student encounters lower-ranking staff members, the narrator offers: “his eyes flit past them for someone more important to talk to” (90). In this way, Bhat encapsulates the privileged graduate student, and how it can feel to be around these sorts of people when you are not so privileged and well-connected.
With the subsequent chapters, which are less plot-driven and read more like vignettes from the narrator's life, the observations continue, but they become less insightful and more embittered. While these sorts of observations are at first familiar in literary and Seinfeld-ian terms, as the book lurches along they feel like more of a crutch. Soon, it seems as if inadequacy is the narrator's singular approach to the world. Consider some of the following examples:
After graduate school, Nina gets a job teaching high school, and in order to develop professionally, she records herself teaching. She reacts as follows “...as soon as I saw my ogre face, and my Humpty Dumpty Body, and the stretch marks on my upper arms, and my shoulders rounded like those of a cartoon vulture, I turned the video off” (155-156). The level of self-loathing is almost parodic. Later, while giving an extemporaneous speech at a Toastmasters meeting, Nina verbalizes the following to the group: “'I'm trying to remember high school Physics. But all I remember is failing'” (158). By the later stages of the book, depressive sledgehammers like these swing freely on virtually every page—sometimes there are several in short succession. And so, as the book crawls on, this style of observation makes the experience seem like you are reading not so much a novel but rather a book-length defense mechanism. Bhat's narrator manages to become self-deprecating beyond tolerable literary levels, to the point of being self-eviscerating.
This is most salient in her explorations of relationships. Of a boyfriend Nina is seeing but apparently not really into, she notes that “He is frustratingly good at sex” (199). Later, with respect to dating, she claims that “coffee dates might as well be job interviews—except you must marry the interviewer and have sex with him for the rest of your life” (224). Your present reviewer will be the first to criticize the innumerable faults of marriage, but this quip makes for a depressingly narrow vision of that institution. These sorts of wisecracks become less witty and more depressing as the book continues. At one point, Nina goes on a date with a doctor who is somewhat eager to get physical down by Halifax's waterfront. In the aftermath, she says “For weeks after, I search The Coast for news of murders” (226).
At times, it seems like it's not all doom and gloom for Nina. Soon enough, she meets a guy she describes as “the kindest person I've ever met” (231). The guy wants to commit, so much so that he deactivates his online dating profile. This prompts the following response from Nina: “I deactivate my account, too. I picture marrying him under strands of twinkle lights and white mayflowers on the roof of the Seaport Market. I know my parents would like him. But I put off answering his latest message. It goes unanswered, and so goes the next. I ghost him. I'm a ghost” (232). By this point, the reader is left to wonder if this is not just the stream-of-consciousness of someone who is unhappy, but rather that of someone who cannot be happy. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is inadequacy porn.
But the book ends strongly. In the last vignette, the narrator starts a blog and soon finds that she has a troll. Rather than ignoring him, she actually tracks him down and schedules a meet-up. This may seem improbable and heretofore unforeseeable in the narrative, but it actually makes for a very fitting conclusion. After all, the narrator has effectively been trolling herself for the entirety of the book, and now she gets to meet a living, breathing (and rather pathetic) internet troll. Finally, Nina shows some nerve and stands up for herself like an adult. Still, it's not enough to convince this reader that Nina is anything approaching a well-adjusted grown-up. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is almost like a coming-of-age novel where the principal character doesn't actually come of age. Perhaps this marks the toll of Nina's sexual assault. The reader, sort of like the narrator, ends up waiting for something to happen to mark some kind of progress, but both end up just waiting.
A few memorable vignettes might not be enough for the majority of readers. All told, The Most Precious Substance on Earth seems to suggest that a life dedicated to language and storytelling is inherently depressing and unfulfilling and incomplete. But does it have to be? I'd recommend reading Bhat's novel to answer that question for yourself. The book serves as a great litmus test for your tolerance of how many maimed, melancholy thoughts you can stomach in one reading session.