India, Jan. 31 -- In Bangalore in 2017, TJS George pulled out an old black-and-white photograph of a Vietnamese woman on a motorcycle. "If you go to Vietnam, remember me to her. She was very important to me in those days," he told his son. "You've spoiled it," his son Jeet said. "You shouldn't have said that. It's better to be silent about some things." Jeet Thayil's The Elsewhereans is an olio of family memoir, autofiction and about two dozen photographs. He calls it a documentary novel. His family had "lived Elsewhere too long"; between them, in Bombay, Patna, New York, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Bangalore, Paris, Berlin... They had "become Elsewhereans." The book chronicles life on the move. It opens with an old photograph of a young Ammu Thomas, a schoolteacher in Cochin, posing with several sports trophies won as a student. It was sent as her matrimonial photo to George, a journalist in Bombay. The wedding was held at Ammu's home in Mamalassery, built on land that was once a "pleasure station" for the king of Travancore gifted to her ancestors, near the Muvattupuzha river. After they were married, they lived in Bombay for a few years before moving to Patna in the 1960s, where he, the editor of a newspaper, was arrested on charges of sedition after upsetting the chief minister. He went to North Vietnam on a four-week reporting trip and stayed on for seven months, even after the fall of Saigon. In Hong Kong, fed up of working in a predominantly White newsroom, he launched a magazine covering Asia for Asians - without the White gaze and not under White supervision - in the 1970s. In Hong Kong, "In the pageantry of the island, unfolding district by district, Ammu experiences Elsewhere as a spiritual calling. Among crowds of people of every race and religion, she knows internationalism as the true nationalism and freedom as the only patriotism." The narrative is non-linear; it zigzags across time and tone. In 2018, their son, Jeet, goes to Vietnam looking for Nguyen Phuc Chau, the woman from his father's old photograph. Here the book turns into a travelogue as he goes on a guided tour with Chau's granddaughter, who runs a travel agency. The photograph, this family secret, is also the cover of The Elsewhereans. But how much of it is true? In an interview, Thayil has said his mother wanted to tear that photo into a thousand pieces. It's easy enough to piece together or at least check the veracity of this novel online. But the mysteriousness is kind of the point. Thayil's genre defiance, particularly his smoke-and-mirrors form, has divided readers and critics. How much of the novel's Jeet is Thayil? What's true, what's untrue? Perhaps the answer is to be found in a hypnotic little note: "If memory could speak what would it say? Only lies. Beautiful lies quietly said with a straight face and a pure heart. And in the saying, the lies, of every colour and size and degree of intent, all the lies would be true. As here, at the start, where memory might say something as plain and clear as this: All stories begin with a river, and end with one. And you might say in reply, Yes, I believe this to be true." The veneer of fiction is fine because it just flows. It reads like a novel and it feels real. It's a rare thing to be able to write well about one's family without necessarily excavating pain. It's what makes The Elsewhereans so enjoyable. But in the middle, it becomes sort of fragmentary. A stream of unrelated strangers make appearances. He has a bad trip at a poetry reading, and shoplifts booze in Paris. He meets a tofu stall owner in Hong Kong who says he was once Mao's ghostwriter. It's all interesting enough, but sticks out. This section (and the vast cast of minor characters, all Elsewhereans here to make a point) undercuts an otherwsise-satisfying novel. The tale picks up again when the family coalesces at Ammu's childhood home. Ammu and George are in their nineties. There isn't any family drama, it just, as Ammu thinks, "seems correct then that these memories have lost their sting and can no longer cause hurt or happiness. They are only receptacles to return to her past."...