Arranged marriages are an uncommon concern in American fiction. We belong to a culture ideologically committed to love matches, but the two main characters in Varun Gauri’s debut novel, For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, don’t. Meena and Avi are a young Indian couple living in small-town America, though neither are profoundly traditional, despite their best efforts.

Meena has several advanced degrees and has spent her time prior to this arranged marriage in an adulterous affair with an American academic colleague. Avi is an attorney running for office in the anonymous midwestern town of Southgate, home to strip malls, parking lots, and maybe an industrial park. Both, for reasons mysterious even to them, decide on a traditional arranged marriage and meet—in a very nontraditional approach—online to facilitate it. Generally, such unions are shepherded through by the betrothed’s families. But this is the 21st century, and customs must adapt.

This Westernized Indian wife enthuses over her discovery of ancient mores: “Her father had been right. Arranged marriage was good, it was better. This way, sensuality was a gift. Not something you earned, supposedly, through courtship, through seduction, high heels and perfume. Not something you supposedly deserved for who you were, so pretty and so smart. That was a vanity. This, on the other hand, was unexpected, a gift, a blessing.” If this seems like a thin justification for linking one’s life to a stranger’s, Gauri is well aware of such reservations. At one point Avi likens his arranged marriage to a kind of burden in the same way as caring for a lost child.

For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus’ portrait of an Indian American community in a nearly featureless Midwestern town makes clear the author lived this reality. Gauri, who now lives in Bethesda, was raised in the midwest. Likewise, Avi grew up in Southgate and has big ambitions for his compatriots there; Meena, a newcomer, is clearly less gung ho. Indeed, her reserve verges on a tendency to carp that, at the first sign of trouble for the couple, breaks out into open rejection, even scorn. She tries hard to be a good traditional wife, but Gauri conveys rather pointedly that on some profound level, Meena is playacting. She has grown up as a secular cosmopolitan, traveling the world in her youth and trained to value educational achievement above all else. However, her attachment to her traditional father is greater than to her very modern mother. Hence her dive into an arranged marriage. Unfortunately, her father is dead and thus unable to counsel her on how to move forward with the stranger she married.

Predictably, things do not go smoothly for the couple and as the plot grows more complicated, their union slowly begins to resemble a more Americanized marriage. Avi’s Indian friends, uncles, and associates, looking from the outside in, are regularly shocked that the pair’s marriage doesn’t conform to the type of arranged unions they’re familiar with. And as others in the town’s small community of immigrants and first-generation Americans attempt arranged marriage, the difficulties of following through with it in our American culture cannot be ignored. The Western cult of love is too strong, and, with European roots dating back to the legend of Tristan and Isolde, it proves impossible to extricate from Avi and Meena’s hearts. As a Western reader, this reviewer found such a conclusion rather reassuring.

Because while American culture indulges selfishness, love matches are far from the worst of its excesses. Marriage between two people in love, at least in theory if not always in practice, promotes happiness. Arranged marriage, with its indifference to love, does not fit well in a country built on stories of romance. Gauri’s novel depicts how and why that is. For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus wonders if arranged marriage still works well in India—where Meena’s sister, who married for love, seems to exist in a cloud of marital ecstasy.

As the story progresses, Avi and Meena’s marriage morphs into a friendship with the possibility of becoming more, with all the difficulties and wonders such a union involves. They also discover the depths of their ignorance of India’s centuries-old customs and are more than a little abashed at their earlier naivete. Their marriage turns out to be as unique and complicated as anybody’s—or at least anybody who takes the institution seriously. The portrait of their growing awareness of what they really want and how little they understood it, makes For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, fundamentally, a psychological novel. It is Avi’s and Meena’s growing self-knowledge that moves the plot and that makes, at last, for an ambiguous though possibly better marriage.

Published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House and winner of its 2024 Carol Trawick Fiction Prize, Varun Gauri’s For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus is now on sale. 

Gauri joins WWPH’s 2024 Nonfiction Award winner Megan Doney for their joint book launch at 5 p.m. on Oct. 13 at Politics and Prose’s Connecticut Avenue location. politics-prose.com. Free.