Deep Fried
by Mark Doyon
Genre: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9798985035360
Print Length: 252 pages
Reviewed by Frankie Martinez
A cheery, immigrant businessman puts all his hopes into an atypical food truck in this clever, character-rich novel.
When a new vendor called “Bollywood Eggrolls” appears at the food truck park just outside the Broadnax County Courthouse, it attracts a lot of curiosity. Some question its cuisine—Asian fusion featuring Chinese eggrolls filled with Indian curry. Others wonder about the unfamiliar Bollywood stars painted on the side of the truck, among them Katrina Kaif of “Jab Tok Hai Jaan” fame.
Its proprietor, the happy-go-lucky Arjun Chatterjee, doesn’t mind answering any inquiries from prospective customers. An immigrant from Delhi raised in Tucson, Arizona, Arjun narrowly avoided becoming the manager at his father’s Foot Locker by escaping to Virginia with his Amma’s curry recipe and a dream: “In his mind, he had always been leaving for some faraway place where he would shed the shackles of his birth and clothe himself anew in the threads of possibility. He would meet a beautiful girl and settle down in a shining Western city. He would succeed in business. It was intoxicating.”
Optimism seems to be Arjun’s guiding principle for reaching his goals until he receives a strange, anonymous note from someone in the food truck park. While Arjun starts to question himself for what feels like the first time ever, he also wonders who of the food truck park’s own little network of dreamers could have sent him the message.
With twists both humorous and heartbreaking, Deep Fried is a touching story about pursuing freedom in a world that wants to knock you down. Doyon provides multiple playful perspectives on this idea with an eclectic cast of characters: This includes Candy, a Bollywood Eggrolls regular and an unlucky-in-love office worker struggling to find peace in her personal life; Antwaan, an aspiring rapper building street cred by committing petty crimes in order to reject any privileges his parents’ wealth affords him; and Pidgey, the pigeon that hangs out with Arjun in the Bollywood Eggrolls truck and wonders on the whereabouts of the pigeons that came before him.
While characters are satisfyingly connected by their desire for freedom as well as their differing ideas about it, the novel’s platitudes about American liberty may lean a bit too heavily on the American Constitution and Founding Fathers. Doyon manages to keep things fresh by rendering characters exquisitely—detailed backstories, alarming conflict, charming, and just-weird-enough dialogue—and breathing new life into some of the older ideas through the core of his characters. I especially liked Candy’s more wry take on the matter: “You thought America was a big melting pot of people and cultures and cuisines. And it is. But everybody wants to be a cowboy. They want to be cowboys because cowboys are free. Cowboys do whatever they like.”
Deep Fried feels like modern-day folklore—lively, odd, and full of familiar, old-world proverbs that get you through the day.
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