Dysfunctional families are all alike. At least in most coming-of-age novels. The cast of characters has a disconcerting predictability — the precocious but pretty teenager, the self-absorbed mother, the abusive stepfather, the silent father. And the teen is often a variant of the vulnerable yet scheming Lolita. On the pages you almost smell the pheromones.

Urmilla Deshpande’s debut novel A Pack of Lies falls in the same category.

Virginia — Ginny to everyone — has just moved with her mother to a little apartment in the big city called Bombay . The early portrait is extremely engaging: a rebellious girl with a heightened olfactory sense, trying to get the attention of her famous negligent mother, learning to live without her father and their big old house, polishing for the first time her scuffed Mary Janes. In the novel’s short episodes, moving back and forth in time, Ginny soon kisses a Budweiser-drinking American boy, smells a Mustang-driving African-American, works for a wheelchair-ridden artist, falls in love with a Kashmiri drug and arms dealer with “sapphire eyes and pale edible skin” and falls for a blond German with a deep cleft under his nose. They are as global as they come, but, as the adjectives reveal, are little more than two-dimensional images in set pieces. And as Ginny goes through the many loves and hates of her life, she herself pales, her voice, despite the first-person narrative, becomes feeble and the plot tiresomely predictable. The last episodes rescue the novel, as the mother, a shadowy presence in the narrative and Ginny’s life so far, finally comes alive.

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