The Charterhouse of Padma

Two women, living in America’s heartland, unearth shocking secrets about the men they love and question the lives they chose.

 P is on deadline. She should be translating. Instead, she’s writing obsessively about her favorite color: chartreuse. A literary translator in Arkansas (of all places), she’s married to Mac, a professional feminist too slick for his own good. As the COVID lockdown commences, P discovers a secret about her husband, one that upends her understanding of her life’s trajectory. In the widening gulf between who she is and who she thought she might be, she imagines a double, someone very like her, but less lonely, more independent, more angry, more maternal, more fun… 

Now we meet another “P”: a novelist. She’s married to a successful poet and translator called Mat. It’s a second marriage—her first fell apart when she came upon a secret concealed by her then-husband. This P is exhausted and enraged: by racial microaggressions, by structural obstacles, by her husband’s dubious responses to her ambitions. Then the pandemic falls and her new novel falters, along with everything else she (and everyone else) had planned. In this new stillness, though, she starts to see her marriage differently. And, unexpectedly, she begins an essay, about her favorite color: chartreuse.

The Charterhouse of Padma is full of delicious surprises, revelations, and sharply observed truths about what is to be brown, a woman, a wife, a mother, and an artist. Exhilarating, electrifying, charged with incisive intellect and humor, this is a novel for anyone who ever wondered how, or if, they ever chose the thing they love.

Praise for The Charterhouse of Padma 

“Every time I thought I knew where Padma Viswanathan’s The Charterhouse of Padma might be going, she surprised me in the best way. This smart, scintillating journey of a text shows what thinking as writing might look like.” —John Keene, author of Counternarratives 

“Padma Viswanathan has brought us a whole new kind of imaginary play. The Charterhouse of Padma is a novel that dances fast and loose with narrative distance, told by narrators whose interiority is writ large. This is a book that is bitter and sweet, awash with asides that will leave you wondering why you never thought to describe things in exactly this way before. Professional feminists anyone? Viswanathan offers us a chance to immerse ourselves in a unique domestic drama: one that manages to be intimate, bewildering, funny as all get out, smart as heck, and convincingly real.” —Ru Freeman, author of Sleeping Alone

“Padma Viswanathan has long been a writer whose work I have admired but she even tops herself with this masterpiece, The Charterhouse of Padma. This book haunted and almost traumatized me with its unrelenting truths about love and life, told with the kind of experimental artistry that wowed me at every vignette. A meditation on color, a domestic/academic mystery, a parable of doubles, an investigation of what companionship means in our era—and more! This novel definitely has a forever position on my favorites shelf! I am in awe and now just want to reread it over and over!” —Porochista Khakpour, author of Tehrangeles