Shubha Sunder's ​Optional Practical Training

Reviewed by Kevin Canfield

(Graywolf Press, 2025)

Don’t be put off by this book’s uninviting title, a bit of legalese borrowed from the branch of U.S. immigration law that regulates what foreign students can do, and for how long, when they are in the States. Shubha Sunder’s Optional Practical Training is a subtle and perceptive first novel about a young Indian woman who moves to the U.S. to study, teach and write. Like her protagonist, Sunder grew up in Bangalore and lives in Boston. Her work exemplifies one of literature’s great truths: Observant newcomers sometimes understand a place better than lifelong residents.

We meet Pavitra, the novel’s 22-year-old narrator, in the mid-2000s, a moment that feels like both olden times and just last week—and one that enables Sunder to write politically-minded fiction that isn’t obliged to explicitly engage with current events. Like the protagonists in Rachel Cusk’s recent novels, Pavitra is a sort of magnet for revealing exchanges with colleagues, friends and strangers.

In conversation with Pavitra, a longtime teacher and fellow immigrant unleashes a righteous condemnation of American education. A smug “citizen of the world” excoriates the habits of people from a country he’s never visited. A Gen Z expat complains that because of frictionless consumerism, it’s not “possible anymore to live a moral life.” Pavitra’s responses to these and other encounters help her understand how the U.S. works, how it doesn’t and whether her future lies there or somewhere else.

When reading this novel, it’s helpful to remember that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants that bounces from one immigration panic to another. In 2006, the year in which the book begins, the country is a half-decade on from the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. While non-white men from abroad are still openly stigmatized—one of Pavitra’s friends, an Indian man who has a beard, is taken aside and searched whenever he visits an airport—others are simply patronized.

Pavitra, who is physically small and ostensibly reserved, is treated with alarming condescension. “You’re from India—I know there are Muslims there, but it’s not like Iran, say, or Iraq,” says a colleague as they discuss Pavitra’s travel documents. “Besides, you’re such a sweet, tiny thing—how could anyone suspect you of being a threat?” In case her point wasn’t clear, the woman punctuates her remarks by gently touching Pavitra’s arm, the way you might reassure a child.

Pavitra’s long-term goal—to make writing a career—subjects her to more of the same later in the novel. In one perfectly awkward scene, she decamps to an artists’ retreat in Maine. A mandatory get-together meant to encourage attendees to talk shop is hijacked by a vegan poet who, as might be expected, lacks self-awareness, a deficit he displays in a grandiose monologue about Lyme disease, baking without butter and “living in exile” in a “world of meat.” When he finally finishes, the poet asks Pavitra about her origins. She tells him she’s living in Boston, but he’s not satisfied. “Where did you come from?” he persists. She parries his questions, aware that he wants her to confirm that she was born abroad. She does, though only after “enjoying his confusion.”

But Pavitra does not spend the bulk of the novel in the company of fellow writers. Sunder’s most nuanced set pieces take place at Pavitra’s school and the restaurants and homes where she shares meals with coworkers and friends. These scenes work on two levels, giving the reader a gratifyingly specific look at the often thankless labor required of teachers—particularly those whose students have been helicopter-parented since they were toddlers—and a relatable depiction of the inchoate frustration caused by the big, powerful and increasingly complex systems that are “like air and water—they’re all around us and within us.”

At the expensive private school where she teaches math, Pavitra and other teachers spend part of each day engaging in a form of triage, determining how, and in what order, to deal with angry phone calls and emails from wealthy parents requesting special accommodations for their kids. One parent, having “made a significant donation to the school’s endowment and earned a reputation, in the science department at least, for being something of a lunatic,” feels her son would earn better grades if only the school would give him the chance. Fact-heavy “written assignments were especially challenging for him,” she says, “so why hadn’t the chemistry teacher figured out alternative ways to measure her child’s understanding? Writing and performing a song, for example? Or making a sculpture?”

Another parent accuses Pavitra “of not understanding the damage that lack of positive feedback can do to a young person. It may just be Dora’s perception that you’re mean, the mother clarified, but you have to understand, her perception is her reality.” Yet another complains after Pavitra tells her daughter “that her work revealed a poor grasp of some basic mathematics.” Discussing the matter with her department head, “I waited for him to voice his amazement at the parents’ overreaction.” Instead, he tells Pavitra that constructive criticism of the kind she offered isn’t “a useful thing for someone like Dee to hear.” To a novice teacher seeking guidance from a seasoned colleague, this is worse than no counsel at all.

Pavitra’s frustration is rooted in the stringent expectations she faced as a student in India: “If a teacher let me know I was displaying ignorance about something I should have learned earlier, I’d think, Oh no, I’m making a fool of myself—and go home to study.” Another teacher, also raised in India, has similar objections to pedagogy as practiced in the U.S.: “No tolerance for lectures. No slideshow without at least one cartoon or a movie. Kids say openly, in their evaluations, I learn more when I’m having fun! I want to say, Excuse me, I’m a scholar of religion, not a circus clown.”

India’s educational system has its own pathologies, Pavitra notes, among them a punishing emphasis on rote memorization. But perhaps the untrammeled consumerism embraced in, and exported by, the U.S. is the most powerfully damaging system of all.

Many Americans, characters in the novel suggest, are ignorant, overweight egomaniacs whose credulity has contaminated the globe. “If there was a lesson America had taught the world,” one character says, “it was that you can make a burger from nothing but crap and convince millions, billions of people to line up for it.” In such a country, another character says, “education was less an entitlement and more a service, which made the kids more clients than students and the goal client satisfaction.”

This idea is personified by the principal of Pavitra’s school. When parents keep griping that Pavitra—a math teacher, remember—is too fixated on facts and correct answers, the principal advises her to see her classroom personality as a kind of consumer product: “Can you expand your strengths so they obscure your weaknesses? Can you make yourself into an effective brand, in other words, and then sell it?”

Later, at a dinner party, she falls into conversation with an Indian man who has been in the U.S. for much longer than her. After learning a bit about her challenges at work, he offers the following advice: “Change your character or change your audience.” It doesn’t matter which she opts for, as long as she’s decisive and relentlessly self-confident. “That is how you conquer America,” he says.
​
Who, in 2025, would argue with him?

---

​Kevin Canfield's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cineaste, Film Comment and other publications. He lives in New York City.