Milwaukee stars in National Book Award finalist 'All This Could Be Different'

A finalist for this year's National Book Awards is set in an exotic location for American literary novels:

Milwaukee.

In addition to its other compelling qualities, Sarah Thankam Mathews' "All This Could Be Different" (Viking) offers a vivid picture of twenty-somethings living, loving, eating, drinking and inching their way toward maturity in Brewers Hill, Harambee, Riverwest, Bay View and other neighborhoods.

Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar, who grew up in Elm Grove, called "All This Could Be Different" the finest depiction of life in Milwaukee since Matthew Desmond's "Evicted."

"It doesn't pull its punches, but is shot through with love for our city," Akhtar wrote in an email.

National Book Award winners will be announced Nov. 16. "All This Could Be Different" is one of five nominees for the year's best novel.

Sneha, the narrator and protagonist, is a young Indian immigrant and University of Wisconsin-Madison grad who comes to work in Milwaukee in 2013. She's a low-level contract consultant doing dehumanizing work at a corporation. Every boss encounter is fraught, because she'd like to be sponsored for permanent residency in the United States.

A queer woman, she looks for love and sex mostly from women, though she can be attracted to men. At the same time, she's gradually building up a community of friends, including her white college and work bro Thom, who calls her "my dude," and Tig, a Black woman who wants to free the world from both gender and capitalism.

Their conversations about sex, race and money, and their other adventures, take place in a dizzying variety of Milwaukee locales. Sneha lives in Brewers Hill; walks along Brady St.; drinks at the Y-Not II, La Cage and Walker's Pint; eats at Lulu and Balzac and BelAir Cantina (who could use her comment on the lobster taco as a pull quote); hears music at Cactus Club, Mad Planet and Fire on Water; hangs out at Milwaukee Public Market; and thrifts at the Historic Third Ward's Goodwill store (officially named Retique). A character down on their luck goes to the food pantry at Riverwest's St. Casimir Church and picks up shifts scooping custard at Leon's. There's a hot sex scene in a car parked (in winter!) in a lot on Commerce Street.

And in a novel with some vigorous critique of our economic system, the references here to Milwaukee's history of socialist mayors are far from trivial.

In a Zoom interview, Mathews said the National Book Award nomination for her debut novel "came as a huge shock and honor." She feels "deep gratitude" that support for this book will allow her to keep writing. She also sees the nomination as "a certain kind of vote of confidence in South Asian stories, queer stories, and stories about parts of the country that don't necessarily get the love and respect that they should."

Mathews lived here from the summer of 2013 through the summer of 2014, working a job she prefers not to discuss. She didn't own a car during her time here, so she spent a lot of time walking around. She confessed with a smile that she didn't eat in restaurants as much as her character Sneha did, but Mathews did love to hang out in Brady Street coffeeshops.

Her novel captures the complications of living here without a car, and the calculus of decision making about asking for, accepting and declining rides. That was part of her effort to show how Sneha was dependent on other people, Mathews said.

With its 22-year-old protagonist, "All This Could Be Different" fits some of the characteristics of a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel; Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," a traditional example of that kind of narrative, gets discussed in the book.

But Mathews said she wanted to write not just the story of a formation of a self, but one about a self created through their relationships with other people — including the comradeship and intellectual mentorship of her friends Tig and Thom. There is an intense love affair with its highs and shattering lows in this book, but it may be that the future will remember "All This Could Be Different" as a great novel about friendship.

Her novel has enough granular detail about Milwaukee to keep a mapmaker busy. But she did not include today's most obvious visual reference to Milwaukee — the Milwaukee Art Museum's Calatrava addition. When I mentioned that to her, Mathews laughed.

A novella she wrote before this book was set primarily at the Milwaukee Art Museum, she said.

Mathews now lives in New York City, where she founded Bed-Stuy Strong at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a mutual-aid network that organized home delivery of groceries to 28,000 Brooklynites in need. The network continues today with other community initiatives.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: From BelAir to Lulu, Milwaukee stars in National Book Award finalist