Quotes
“Freudenberger draws women's complex lives as brilliantly as Austen or Wharton or Woolf, and, with The Newlyweds, has given a performance of beauty and grace.” —Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of a Marriage
“A big, complicated portrait of marriage, culture, family, and love. Freudenberger never settles for an easy answer, and what she delivers is a story that feels absolutely true. Every minute I was away from this book I was longing to be back in the world she created.” —Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake
“Once in a while, you come across a novel with characters so rich and nuanced, and situations so pitch-perfect, that you forget you're reading fiction. The Newlyweds is that sort of novel. I was floored by it--captivated from beginning to end. And now that I'm done, I can't stop thinking about it.” —J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Maine
“Wise, timely, ripe with humor and complexity, The Newlyweds is one of the most believable love stories of our young century.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
“Affecting . . . A genuinely moving story about a woman trying to negotiate two cultures, balancing her parents’ expectations with her own aspirations, her ambition and cynical practicality with deeper, more romantic yearnings. . . . Writing about a foreign country kick[s] Freudenberger’s gift for observation into high gear, and she does a visceral job of conjuring the place where Amina grew up: the countryside ‘so green that you almost expected to look up and see a green sun in the sky; the city streets, hazardous with mobs and rickshaws and pools of black sewage.’ Here there are roaches in the hospital corridors and the danger of violent assaults in which acid is thrown at an enemy. But here there is also a dense network of extended family, family friends and neighbors, a support system in the face of the swirling whirlpools of fortune. Freudenberger captures Amina’s confusion, her sense of being caught between two cultures, for having become someone who is regarded as an outsider in both her new adopted country and the country she still thinks of as home. . . . The Amina-Nasir relationship and Amina’s relationship with her aging parents are the nucleus of this novel and reveal the contradictions deep within Amina’s own heart. These are real, complex, deeply felt connections that have both endured and changed over time, and in depicting them, Freudenberger demonstrates her assurance as a novelist and her knowledge of the complicated arithmetic of familial love, and the mathematics of romantic passion.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Surprising . . . riveting. [The Newlyweds] succeeds based on Freudenberger’s uncanny ability to feel her way inside Amina’s skin as she takes courageous, self-sacrificing steps toward realizing her dream. Caught between two worlds, Amina begins to know herself and to understand the inevitable limits of her choices. . . . For all its global sophistication, the most remarkable accomplishment of this hugely satisfying novel is Freudenberger’s subtle exploration of the stage of adulthood at the heart of The Newlyweds, and all the compromises with selfhood those early years of love and marriage entail.” —Jane Ciabattari, Los Angeles Times
“Evocative . . . From the time she broke into The New Yorker at age 26 with her first-ever published short story, Freudenberger has been regarded as a heavyweight literary phenom. . . . The latest feather in [her] cap is The Newlyweds. It’s really, really good. As always, [she] is fascinated by culture clash, here encapsulated in the marriage of a young woman from Bangladesh and an American engineer from Rochester, New York, who’s 10 years her senior. This is not a love match. Lonely George wants a family; Amina recognizes that her aging parents’ security depends on her making a good marriage, particularly since her father is something of a Bengali Willy Loman. . . . [But] The Newlyweds is so much more than a ‘lost-in-translation’ romp: There are soulful depths to the sociology. Both Amina and George had been in love with other people before they resorted to international computer dating and the novel, which roams in a twisting, lavish storyline between America and Bangladesh, explores the strong and sometimes disastrous pull of those earlier attachments. The Newlyweds also tackles the promise of America and the payment—practical and psychic—it demands of immigrants. . . . [A] luscious and intelligent novel that will stick with you. . . . Freudenberger keep[s] the wonderfulness coming.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“A modern-day variety of arranged marriage. George and Amina, the husband and wife of The Newlyweds, have met on the matchmaking website AsianEuro.com. . . . [But] Freudenberger is doing much more here than writing an exposé of the tawdry system of mail-order brides. . . . Amina, through whose eyes the story is told, is intelligent and self-sufficient—she works a retail job even as she takes care of the house and studies for her citizenship exam. Parts of The Newlyweds might be about the learning curve faced by any freshly married couple—in Amina’s most trenchant line, she says to George: ‘At first we were puzzle pieces. Now we are the puzzle.’ But the marriage is still founded on an essential inequality, and The Newlyweds is quietly damning in showing how George almost unthinkingly exploits the power that comes with having money. Amina feels herself being subtly molded into the kind of spouse—pragmatic and low-maintenance—that George would like her to be . . . The distance between Amina’s American self and her Bangladeshi self is perceptively explored by Freudenberger. Like writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Ha Jin, she deftly shows how strange the rituals of suburban America seem to an observant outsider.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Once certain borders are crossed, it’s impossible to truly go home again—or so finds Amina, the intrepid young Bangladeshi e-mail-order bride at the center of Freudenberger’s quietly compelling second novel. Arriving in suburban Rochester to start a life with her engineer husband, the cautiously game Amina embarks on a new life filled with curious challenges—balancing college classes with a job at Starbucks; unfathomable quantities of snow; and the difficult-to-read friendliness of Americans. But neither does Amina feel quite like herself back in her village, where she returns, green card in hand, to bring her parents to America, only to find herself drawn in by potent family resentments (and the sympathy of a former suitor). Amina’s American dreaming isn’t about self-invention but about reconciling her own contested boundaries, and her journey through the foreign continent of marriage, full of daily encounters with the unknown, takes on an epic power.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“A delight, one of the easiest book recommendations of the year. The cross-cultural tensions and romance so well drawn here recall the pleasures of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. On a recent trip, I read most of The Newlyweds out loud to my wife, and we both fell in love with Freudenberger’s Bangladeshi heroine. Freudenberger is that rare artist who speaks fluently from many different cultural perspectives, without preciousness or undue caution. She understands the complicated negotiations that always attend contacts between people of radically different backgrounds. The Newlyweds explores the tangled misimpressions and deceptions that separate Amina and George—and sometimes bind them together. Freudenberger knows Amina as well as Jane Austen knows Emma, and despite its globe-spanning set changes, The Newlyweds offers a reading experience redolent of Janeite charms: gentle touches of social satire, subtly drawn characters and dialogue that expresses far more than its polite surface. And how Freudenberger keeps the chapters moving is a mystery of perpetual motion . . . Much of the appeal of The Newlyweds is the way Amina and George negotiate the demands of their respective families with a mixture of affection and exasperation. Moving gracefully between the suburbs of Rochester and the aromatic markets of Dhaka, the novel locates that unsettling inflection point when we shift from being cared for by our parents to caring for them—without ever losing the need to please them, to win their approval, to make them happy. . . . Suspended between two cultures, two homes 8,000 miles apart, Amina wonders if there’s an essential identity that exists ‘beneath languages’ [and she] can’t escape her suspicion that the price of assimilation is too high. George and Amina soon realize, as any couple must, that they don’t know as much about each other as they once believed. After all, an online algorithm is so primitive compared with the intimate knowledge a village matchmaker can offer a young couple in the villages of Bangladesh. On either side of the world, making a marriage work demands casting off not just old lovers, but cherished fantasies about who we are. Whether these two alien lovebirds can—or should—do that is the question Freudenberger poses so beguilingly.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Freudenberger is aware of the pitfalls she faces in telling us Amina’s tale, and she wants us to be aware of them, too. At stake here isn’t—or shouldn’t be—the question of authenticity; the more pressing issue is verisimilitude, truthlikeness, the illusion of being real. [As] a work in the realist vein, truthlikeness is important to [The Newlyweds’] ambitions, and Freudenberger brings impressive attributes to bear in achieving it: a powerful sense of empathy, of being able to imagine what it is to be someone else, to feel what someone else feels; an effective writing style that avoids drawing attention to itself; and an international sensibility, which allows her to write about places outside America not as peripheral—mere playgrounds for American characters—but as central to themselves. . . . Set largely in Dhaka and Rochester, with stopovers in New York City and rural Bangladesh, the love polyhedron that is The Newlyweds is at heart a tale of never-ending migrations. Its world is full of mirrors, the refracted similarities conjured up by globalization. Upstate New Yorkers wear elements of South Asian garb to yoga studios, and a young man pulls a Bangladeshi rickshaw in ‘a lungi and a black T-shirt with a picture of the Sydney Opera House in neon green.’ But differences remain, and one of these lies on attitudes toward relationships between younger adults and the elderly. . . Truths are indeed present in this novel—in its clear-eyed openness and compassion toward the world, in its nuanced and human representation of Muslim characters and their varying Islams, and in the understanding and sympathy it displays for the nostalgia of migrants—which is to say, for all human beings, even those who are born and die in the same town and travel only in time.” —Mohsin Hamid, The New York Times Book Review
“Dazzling . . . Freudenberger's rich, wise, bighearted novel concerns a young woman who leaves her family in Bangladesh to live in America as the wife of a man she met on the Internet...Each harbors complications, secrets, desires, disappointments—complications the 30-something author probes with a clarity of language and empathy of soul that make her one of the most perceptive and least mannered younger storytellers working today. An experienced traveler throughout Asia, Freudenberger found her inspiration for The Newlyweds in a chance airplane encounter with a woman who was herself bound for an Internet-facilitated marriage to an American man; that new bride, now a friend, gave permission for her life story to be absorbed into fiction. And in return, the writer works with care and respect, giving a full voice to every Deshi aunt, American cousin, and passing employee at the Starbucks where Amina finds a job. Freudenberger moves gracefully between South Asian fantasies of American life and the realities of bone-cold, snow-prone upstate New York—and turns the coming together of newlyweds Amina and George into a readers' banquet. Grade: A.” —Lisa Schwartzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
