A Suitable Boy - Companion to the Novel

Vikram Seth: Overview

Critic: D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke

Source: Contemporary Novelists, 6th ed., edited by Susan Windisch Brown, St. James Press, 1996

Criticism about: Vikram Seth (1952-)

Genre(s): Travel literature; Domestic fiction; Fables; Animal tales; Sonnets; Epics; Children's literature; Realistic novels; Family sagas

Vikram Seth is a poet, travel writer, playwright, writer of fables, translator, and librettist, but it is as a novelist that he has been most highly acclaimed. His two novels, one in verse (The Golden Gate) and the other in prose (A Suitable Boy) form a curious pair and a curious achievement.

A novel in verse is not a long narrative poem but one that deals with characters and human relationships in a social milieu as a novel does but in the medium of verse. The form is rare; Seth's only precursors are Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which in its English translation by Charles Johnston was the book's original stimulus. The Golden Gate is about American society; when Seth, an Indian, was asked why he writes about it, his reply was: "One can't quarrel with inspiration." The novel deals with personal relations, love, loss, and mortality with an acuteness and delicacy of perception, a humorous yet compassionate and very robust understanding of human beings--particularly the difference in generations--not conflicts but just stances, desires. Seth deals with two sorts--the older, modern kind of living, feeling, and thinking; and the sometimes crippling freedom of the postmodern period, where the old monogamous loves between sexes are now a part of a rosy past. It is different from Restoration comedy, which is essentially mechanical and heartless. The Golden Gate is witty--but it is all heart.

The influence of Pushkin is exceedingly strong as regards the meticulous reflection of the social fabric, individual characters, interaction, and, above all, the pervasive irony, directed often (as Alexander Pope's is not) against the author himself. Seth himself is like Goldmith's Chinaman, a poised, amused outsider who considers this society from the inside, is critical, but (like Pushkin) never sets himself to be a judge, only a wry commentator. He shows us how balled-up their loves, their art, and publicity are--but he is Kim Tarvesh in anagram, the alcoholic, thesis-bedeviled foreigner on the fringe. Tarvesh is like Chaucer the pilgrim, narrower and more naive than the omniscient Vikram Seth. The unbroken use of the Pushkin stanza form, the tetrameter sonnet, enhances rather than impedes the poised style, the sophistication of diction and the effortless yet persuasive rhythm.

A Suitable Boy made a literary lion of Seth. The media dwelt on its 700,000 words and 1,349 pages--the longest novel published in England since Richardson's Clarissa (1747-1748) and longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace--and on Seth's advance of more than $2 million. More relevant are the artistic comparisons made to Jane Austen, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Dickens.

A Suitable Boy is set wholly in India, where Seth now resides. The main plotline, like that of The Golden Gate, centers on the question of finding a suitable partner, and here it assumes an Austenean form. Will the heroine, Lata, submit to Mrs. Rupa Mehra's arrangements or will she follow her own spirit, even if that means defying not only her mother but barriers of caste and religion? Three candidates present themselves: Kabir, a cricketer, dashing but a Muslim; Amit Chatterji, a Bengali poet and novelist, sophisticated, rich, and a Brahmin; and Harish, a brisk young man determined to make a career for himself in the shoe manufacturing industry. Lata finally settles for Harish, not implausible because unromantic, an index of Seth's own pragmatism and of the direction in which India is, probably, heading.

Affinities to Middlemarch also exist. Just as George Eliot examined the great political and social changes in an earlier England, so Seth writing in the 1990s recreates the period of transition (1951-1952) after independence (1947)--but without Eliot's rigorous critical dimension. In addition to the Mehras, three other families are important: the Kapoors, the Khans, and the Chatterjis. Their fates are intertwined. Really, a multitude of characters and events throng the novel; the setting moves back and forth between the cities of Brahmpur (which is fictional) and Calcutta, with excursions to New Delhi, Kanpur, and Lucknow and to a remote village where Maan Kapoor spends a month in exile. Seth offers a huge, thick, and multilayered slice of Indian life that, in its veracity, serves to counter the widespread false views of India and improve the world's understanding of his country.

The historical scale of Seth's novel invites comparison with War and Peace. Like Tolstoy, Seth writes the history of the recent past from the point of view of individuals whose lives are affected by the great historical events of the time and also crosses the boundary between the invented and the historical. Nehru is his equivalent of Napoleon.

In contrast to the fierce "magic realism" of Salman Rushdie, Seth writes in a 19th-century realist mode with a vein of 18th-century sentiment, flat at times but generally eminently readable and engaging (but not quite equaling his great predecessors or the sparkle of The Golden Gate). Seth's novels show that it is wrong to privilege modernist or postmodernist modes or innovation; tradition endures, sustains, and can provide for major achievement.

Source: D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, "Vikram Seth: Overview" in Contemporary Novelists, 6th ed., edited by Susan Windisch Brown, St. James Press, 1996.

Source Database: Literature Resource Center

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