What Tony D'Souza is working on

Several NBCC members have been impressed by D'Souza's first novel, Whiteman, published earlier this year. Here's what he's up to next.

I'm focused on the end game of The Konkans, my new novel. Basically, this is a novel narrated in present time by the son of a white women and a Konkan man, thirty years removed, telling stories of immigration to the U.S., the history of the Konkans. The vehicle driving the book is the years-long affair of the narrator's mother and uncle. The Konkans are the Catholic Indians of Goa that Portuguese colonization left behind. They collaborated with the British during the Raj, and the narrator explores the wrongs of his grandfather, who was a police commissioner for the British, and who tortured and killed Hindus to enrich himself. It's about inherited guilt, race, immigration to America, and as always with me, sex. Half is set in Chicago, and half in India. As with Whiteman, readers will assume that I am the narrator. Fine with me. If it reads true, people think it must be. That's a compliment. But just as with Whiteman, the vast majority of the book is imagined. I do draw heavily on my knowledge of what's it's like to be the son of a Konkan man and a white American woman, as that is in fact who I am. The book has all the energy of Whiteman, but is a very different book. It's a little darker. I wrote most of it before I went on tour, and am finishing it now. I wrote articles for The New Yorker, Salon, Esquire, and a slew of other places in airport and hotel bars while on tour, by the way. I've discovered a lot about myself this year. One is that I can write on the road.