Book Review: The Default World by Naomi Kanakia

Recommended, but maybe start with Money Matters to see if you like her style

I went into The Default World with mixed expectations. Its author,

Naomi Kanakia

, is the proprietor of Woman of Letters, a Substack I read consistently for its literary criticism and essays. That body of work includes a very likable novella, Money Matters, but also a large number of short “tales.” These tales are well-crafted but not to my personal taste, being politically didactic and often autofictional, so I was concerned that these leanings would show up in The Default World. Luckily, I can bring a positive report; while it’s not a perfect novel, it’s a compelling read that preserves the unique aspects of Kanakia’s style.

The Default World tells the story of Jhanvi, a transgender Indian-American woman who seems to be in her late twenties. She has a stable life working at a grocery coöp in Sacramento, but, when the novel begins, she’s frustrated with her savings not accumulating quickly enough for her to get surgeries to pass as a cis woman. Instead of doing any of the logical things somebody in this situation would do, like starting a GoFundMe or leaving for an employer who pays more, she decides to convince a college friend and sexting buddy, Henry, to marry her for spousal healthcare benefits.

Astoundingly, this almost works. Henry thinks this is a good idea, so good an idea he encourages Jhanvi to turn it into a startup that matches people up for sham insurance marriages. But when Jhanvi heads to San Francisco to meet him and his roommates at the so-called “Fun Haus”, it all falls apart.¹ The alternative denizens of his rental, who call themselves “fire eaters”, are skeptical of Jhanvi disrupting their polyamorous configuration.²

That isn’t to say that they had a stable setup in the first place; Henry has just broken up with his product-manager-cum-internet-influencer girlfriend Audrey, but for all practical purposes they’re still in a relationship, just a less intense one. Audrey has a close but unequal relationship with Katie, who spends her time obsessing about minimalism and leftist purity politics. Those three are often on awkward terms with the fourth roommate Roshie, a competent but blunt woman who bankrolls many of the group’s party escapades without actually seeming to have any interest in whatever being a fire eater entails.

None of these characters come off very well. Roshie, the most likable of the bunch, is put-together professionally, and tends to be nice to Jhanvi in her own unique way, but can’t come to terms with how difficult it is to buy true friendship. Katie plays up her leftist anti-carceral credentials, but Jhanvi has to guilt her into actually providing help when she needs it most. Audrey, the most outright immoral of this messed-up bunch, yanks basically everybody else around in her quest for fame. Henry at least doesn’t come off as evil, but he’s too awed by the trappings of the alternative scene to advocate for himself or anybody else. And Jhanvi fundamentally has a valid case against Henry and his crew, but she’s also self-destructive, manipulative, and prone to holding silly grudges.

Kanakia sets up plenty of moral dilemmas to test these characters’ mettle, and they usually don’t pass. None of them are exactly willing to help Jhanvi get her surgeries. They eventually stop one of their major bacchanalias due to major issues caused by inadequate soundproofing, but basically everybody comes out partially responsible for the failure. Each one of them faces additional trials of their ethics, tailored to their personal foibles.

Many of the issues in the book revolve around money, which is impressive when you consider how financially privileged many of these characters are. Only Jhanvi and a few of the minor characters are not earning giant San Francisco salaries. Many of them went to Stanford, and even Roshie, who’s subtly judged for not being of quite their class, went to a good university and was raised in the middle class. Being among the winners of the American economy doesn’t free them from a tense relationship with money, showing their non-traditional lifestyle by scrimping on housing expenses only to blow it all on drugs and parties.

Jhanvi at least has sensible goals with her money, but that doesn’t mean that she has a healthy relationship with work.³ She dislikes basically every job she’s had to some extent, and isn’t inclined to try to fix that when her cousin offers to help. It’s totally possible to read this as commentary on the dispiriting nature of work under capitalism or whatever, and that might be what Kanakia intended given her lefty politics. But I read it a little differently: Jhanvi simultaneously thinks she’s too good, with her fancy Stanford degree, to try to make it in a non-prestigious career, and is too dejected by internal and external transphobia to want to get back into those careers. This, and maybe also a lack of good advice, leads her to be dissatisfied with her life.

Another theme in the book is whether the hedonism of the bunch, which attracts Jhanvi to them, is actually a recipe for a good lifestyle. I hope I’m not just projecting my own views onto Kanakia when I claim she answers in the negative. None of the core four actually seem to be having fun, between roommate drama and leftist guilt and toxic comparisons. The minor characters who flit about the edges of the group, Purpose, Synestra, and Achilles, don’t seem viscerally unhappy, but the reader also views their lives so briefly that it’s hard to tell. I appreciated the nuance here, but The Default World frequently veers away from reckoning with whether the Fun Haus’s sybaritic lifestyle has helped or hurt them.

The book benefits from Kanakia’s writing style, which is reined in compared to Money Matters and some of her Substack works, but still distinctive. The tone is almost always colloquial, with a narrator who isn’t hesitant to jump in and explain Jhanvi’s thoughts, feelings, and background. I wouldn’t want all literary works to be written in this way — sometimes it’s nice to be confused by the protagonist or jump into the middle of a bunch of action — but it helps make it an enjoyable read despite dark subject matter and unlikable characters.

In the end, The Default World is a strong book, but something hard to define is missing that sets it apart from the best books I’ve read. There’s plenty of complexity and nuance, but not much of a positive vision. At the end, Jhanvi, Henry, and his roommates have somehow combined their flaws and conflicts into an apparently functional working relationship, but this never seems like anything more than a temporary pause in the ongoing chaos of the fire-eater lifestyle, rather than an actual resolution to the tensions that drive the plot. Although it could benefit from a more ambitious and conclusive finale, it’s still a compelling narrative that I strongly recommend.

1. It is completely unintentional that I read a book about somebody who quits a job at a grocery store to move to the Bay Area in between quitting my own job at a grocery store and moving to the Bay Area.

2. The fire-eaters term seems to be Kanakia’s invention for the book. I’ll probably have a better sense in a few months, once I’ve lived in the Bay some, but generally my impression is that her portrait of San Francisco is lightly exaggerated but does reflect a real strain of hedonism in tech culture.

3. There’s an interesting comparison with Jack from Money Matters here. They both should be in a much better financial position given their material advantages than they are. But Jack’s issues clearly stem from major personal flaws, and Jhanvi’s are a mix of personal and societal. So Jack comes across as more immoral, but Kanakia seems to try harder to make the reader like Jack to balance it out.