It is one thing to read a book about the immigrant experience in East London's Bangladeshi areas and to think you've learned something about the matter. It is quite another to read the same book while on a bus going through those very areas, on your way to the climbing gym there where you're going to buy a six-month pass despite the news that morning that right in that very neighborhood a man (a martial arts instructor, no less) was brutally attacked in bright daylight by a gang of five masked Asian men, and you're sitting next to a brown woman wearing a sari, while in front of you a black woman is yelling at her kids in a language you don't recognize.

I thus realize the need for books to explain to outsiders what it's like living in these communities. I just refuse to accept this is the best example of how to do it.

The book is world-famous, and the reviews at the time of publication were extremely positive. But reading those reviews almost a decade after, I wonder how many of the critics still feel like that. They are all hyperbolical, but to take perhaps the worst example, would anyone nowadays agree with the sentiment that Ali is "among Britain's greatest writers"? Her two follow-up books have sank without a trace.

It seems very much a case of political correctness and wishful thinking going overboard. A halfway-decent book about people-not-like-us-yet-living-amongst-us arrives from a suitably-ethnic-new-author, and who is brave enough to be the lone voice among the critics calling out the book for its maddeningly passive main character, stereotypical other characters, lack of anything much happening, and dissatisfying and unbelievable ending? Much safer to go with the crowd and bestow meaningless praise on the book for its "effortless style" or its "emotionally literate story-telling", whatever those mean. Hey, at least nobody can argue with you about those since they're so vague as to be meaningless.

The worst fault in the book is the curious lifelessness of everyone. Tragic things happen to people but nobody seems to really care, least of all the reader. Researching the author after finishing the book it did not surprise me the least that she left Dhaka at age of three and has no memories of living in Bangladesh; that she doesn't even speak Bangladeshi; and that she has never lived in the Brick Lane area or worked the dead-end jobs that the characters in the book do. Nope, that was not her path. For her, it was a university degree, some cookie-cutter "creative" jobs, a white "management consultant" husband, some time off to "take care of the babies", and then writing the book and becoming a millionaire. In other words, she's writing about things she's just researched, not lived, and she's not a good enough writer to pull it off.

She saw an opening in the market and was just talented enough to grab it, I have no problem with that. But with that other young British mommy who happened to hit the publishing motherlode with her stories about a young boy going to wizardry school, at least nobody pretended her books were great literature. It does a disservice to Monica Ali herself to pretend she's something she's not.