The Least Resistance

Sarah K. Inman’s The Least Resistance is a quick, engaging novel about New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as seen through the eyes of Chanda, a sheltered, mentally challenged Uptown woman. After her mother, The Old Woman, dies during the storm, her mother’s caregiver, LaKesha, decides to check on her own family and takes Chanda with her to Central City. So begins Chanda’s adventure from a slightly affected estate on St. Charles Avenue across the whole of the city, finally ending on the Claiborne overpass.

Chanda’s experience before the storm is so narrow that when faced with new situations and people, she often repeats instructions and mantras from her yoga classes and philosophic slivers she’s read on tea bags, which are taken as a quiet genius by the harrowed, recovering people that she meets. While everyone who meets her is drawn to Chanda, most are too absorbed in their own suffering and recovery to notice what might otherwise have been taken for limitations.

The story is slim and simply told, stripped down to recognizable stereotypes used like shorthand. But because the stereotypes are presented with little or no judgment on the part of our main character, the story mostly manages to rise above offense. Chanda perceives nothing as inherently bad, but rather experiences everything with the same passive acceptance—the least resistance. Because she is nonjudgmental, every type of person she encounters welcomes Chanda into his or her own experience.

Called an “apocalyptic reinvention of Kosinki’s classic fable Being There” by author Bill Loehfelm, this is a story that is less about Katrina than it is about New Orleanians reacting to the storm and living their lives in its wake. Chanda’s passivity illuminates the eternally unchanging nature of the city, in all its casual racism, brilliant creativity, blind ignorance and endless generosity.

Sarah K. Inman teaches and performs as an aerialist in New Orleans. Her previous book, Finishing Skills, published by Livingston Press, is about women’s boxing and is also set in New Orleans.