Ten Writers Who Are Reinventing the Art of Storytelling

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Nigam, now a professor and researcher in the Harvard Medical School, clearly relishes the satirical potential of this unusual case history—but his novel is far from merely funny. His skill, his love for tumbledown Old Delhi—where his grandparents used to live—and his sure eye and ear for Indian detail make his novel a fascinating hybrid. It is a timeless-feeling fable about art, love, and transcendence that is also spiced with the real: film music, Sanjay Gandhi, and India's rush into the world economy. And as for Sonalal himself, Nigam puts it best: “Like all my characters, he's flawed—that's what makes him interesting—but he's also after something higher. And that pursuit is what lets him hang on to just a little nobility.”

ELLEN MILLER

When Ellen Miller, 31, was growing up in New York City—where she still lives—she was faced with a painful puzzle. “I saw people the media called addicts and dismissed,” she says. “I couldn't accept the idea that what these people were doing to themselves was meaningless, or merely 'fun.' It didn't look fun. It had to have some kind of purpose, it had to be some kind of quest.”

The addict-heroine of Ellen Miller's debut novel, Like Being Killed (Dutton), is on a quest for, among other things, oblivion. A 25-year-old graduate of Brown who lives in squalor on New York's Lower East Side, Ilyana Meyerovich snorts heroin, and her drug use has slipped well beyond the recreational. Jewish, brilliant, burned out, obsessed with her ethnic past, the workings of the human body, and the pain of being alive, she's no Gen X spoiled brat but rather a worthy descendant of all the tormented intellectual heroes of American Jewish fiction, from Saul Bellow to Philip Roth.

Ilyana is doing her fucked-up best to deaden the memory of her betrayal of a beloved friend: Susie Lyons, her onetime roommate. In portraying Susie, Miller does the most difficult of fictional tricks—she creates a character almost wholly good and still genuinely believable.

For Miller, who earned her M.F.A. from New York University, what's important as she tells the story of the friends' breakup and Ilyana's harrowing decline is finding a balance between the two young women's perspectives. If the death-obsessed Ilyana looks away from the half of life that's generous and loving, Susie looks away too: “Susie believes that everything can be fixed,” says Miller. “But what Ilyana knows is that some things are just irreparably unfair and unfortunate.”

It's a measure of Miller's honesty and talent as a writer that Ilyana's journey to the lower depths never seems either noble or inhuman. Says Miller, “I was equally impatient with the media, who stripped down junkies' lives and consciousness to nothing, and with a certain punk-rock nihilism that said 'drugs are authenticity' and made the quest for the high itself into the main character. The quest—and my book—doesn't end with the drug; it ends with the human heart.”

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