Seth, 41, an Oxford-educated Indian who lives in New Delhi, originally intended to write five short novels; he started the first and apparently couldn’t stop. He has said he was amazed when publishers greeted his manuscript with enthusiasm. One of them, he claims, “objected to its brevity” but bid anyway. In the end he received a total of more than $1 million for U.S., British and Indian rights. Seth must be used to pulling off the impossible by now-his last novel, “The Golden Gate,” got rave reviews despite being written entirely in verse–but his American publisher is trusting to more than Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and prosperity, to sell this book. A huge publicity campaign is underway, in hopes that “A Suitable Boy” will be the first novel priced at $30 to hit best-seller lists.
“A Suitable Boy” is a family saga set in India during the early 1950s. Lata, a college student, and her sister, Savita, a newlywed, are two of the central characters; they spawn an enormous array of friends and relatives who themselves set in motion dozens of subplots involving local and national politics, Hinduism, Islam, agriculture, children, shoes, poetry, music and a dog. Savita’s wedding opens the book and Lata’s concludes it; in between, her mother’s determination to find “a suitable boy” for Lata turns up like a musical motif every middle-size clump of pages or so.
All these doings are recounted in mild, amiable tones, the voice of a storyteller who is in there for the long haul. Even the multiple plots seem to work themselves out with a minimum of tension. Elections, love affairs, riots-somehow the main characters pass through these events all but untouched. Or more precisely, we ourselves are never very moved by what Seth tells us about his characters’ deepest emotions. As a narrator he is more of a chess player, moving his people strategically about the text, than he is a dramatist. What he really seems to enjoy is letting his characters burst into verse-one whole family is given to conversing largely in doggerel-or letting them deliver long political diatribes. Yet the quantity of vivid detail is such that scene after scene springs to life. When Seth describes how an expert craftsman makes a pair of shoes, or how an old farmer plows his master’s field on a hot day, the novel casts a fine spell.
Very few novels demand extraordinary length, and this isn’t one of them. But Seth’s publishers aren’t entirely crazy: there is something strangely appealing about “A Suitable Boy.” As you turn page after quiet page, as Lata and Haresh and Meher and Tasneem and Maan and dozens of others stroll in and out of each chapter, what you’re doing gradually passes beyond reading. It becomes an involuntary act, like breathing. The end, for which you have waited so long, arrives without fanfare: there’s Lata’s wedding, and the ice-cream cone, and the train station, and the monkey-and it’s over. Suddenly, you feel light.
