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Copyright 1993 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
May 2, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
NAME: Vikram Seth
SECTION: Section 6; Page 32; Column 1; Magazine Desk
LENGTH: 4947 words
HEADLINE: Vikram Seth's Big Book
BYLINE: By Richard B. Woodward;
Richard B. Woodward is a regular contributor to this magazine. His last
literary profile was of Cormac McCarthy.
BODY:
At the Austrian Embassy in New Delhi, members of the Indian capital's
foreign diplomatic corps and local cultural elite have assembled on a
balmy February evening for a recital of Schubert's "Die Schone
Mullerin." Ambling through the French doors from patio to drawing room,
they trade greetings with the Austrian Ambassador, piano accompanist
for this special event. The magnet for the gathering, however, is the
unfamiliar baritone, a more remote and dapper figure, so slight he
seems to bob below the surface of the crowd. In this layer of New Delhi
society, where the circuit of embassy parties is part of the daily
grind, the public singing debut of the Indian writer, Vikram Seth,
offers something even more attractive than European wine or American
whisky.
Along with a burgundy vest, gray slacks and a paisley silk scarf curled
around his neck, Seth wears an aura of youthful fame into the room. The
week before the 40-year-old had appeared on the cover of Sunday
magazine, which dubbed him "The Golden Boy" because of the $1.1 million
advance he has received from Indian, British and American publishers
for "A Suitable Boy," his native epic of post-independence. And in the
weeks to come there will be no avoiding his handsomely moody face on
Indian newstands. (Few journalists had read the 1,366-page book and
concentrated instead on the money, an unprecedented sum for an Indian
writer.) Despite the hoopla, orchestrated by Seth and Penguin Books
India with a time-released series of interviews, he appears at the
embassy without fanfare. His entourage consists of his parents in the
front row.
Before seating himself at the piano, the Ambassador, Christoph Cornaro,
explains that the recital will be an informal affair, a bit of old
Vienna, friends entertaining friends. They are a couple of Schubert
amateurs who have played together irregularly for less than two years.
He outlines the song cycle's theme -- a lad's piteous yearning for a
mill maid -- and promises an evening full of "hope, love, jealousy,
anger." Seth removes his scarf and observes in his soft, scholarly
manner that the poems of the cycle were written by Wilhelm Muller,
father of the august 19th-century orientalist, Max Muller. He seems to
have selected this pleasant West-meets-East anecdote to hang in the air
over the duo's own partnership.
Hands in pockets, reading from sheet music on a stand adjusted for his
5-foot-3 height, Seth gives a heartfelt performance that is generously
received. His obvious technical limitations -- he is more light tenor
than baritone and lacks the forceful, rounded voice the music calls for
-- can partly be overlooked. He is singing a difficult masterpiece of
the lied literature despite never having taken a lesson in European
classical music. "Schubert is just for pleasure," he later says
apologetically. "There wasn't any attempt to be anything but competent."
Seth has never wanted for daring or confidence. In 1981 he hitchhiked
4,000 miles across China and produced the charming, clear-eyed
travelogue "From Heaven Lake." Trained as an economist at Oxford and
Stanford, he put off his Ph.D. to write a story -- in the form of
linked sonnets -- about San Francisco yuppies. Published in 1986
without advance noise, "The Golden Gate" was a dazzling literary feat
and became a surprise hit, touted by Gore Vidal as "the great
California novel." Seth has also translated Tang poetry (he is fluent
in Chinese, Hindi and German), considered recalcitrant to faithful
rendering in Western languages. And now, without ever having written a
short story, he has devoted most of the last six years to bringing
forth one of the longest works of fiction written in English in this
century.
According to one of the stanzas in "The Golden Gate," Seth rhymes with
"great," an aspiration shared by "A Suitable Boy." Featuring dozens of
characters from interrelated families, a historical setting of the
momentous 1952 elections (India's first after independence in 1947),
and passages on land reform, Hindustani music, life styles of Muslim
courtesans and the economics of the shoe industry, the novel invites
comparisons to the thick and well-researched novels of Trollope and
Tolstoy. (At nearly 800,000 words, it is longer than "War and Peace.")
Deliberately plain and uninvolved in its syntax and psychology, "A
Suitable Boy" reads as though Flaubert, Joyce and Nabokov had never
existed. It isn't so much post-modern as pre-modern.
Were the background not so thoroughly Indian, the multifamily plot and
the reactionary style might be seen as a commercial ploy. (It is a main
selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.) But "A Suitable Boy" makes
few concessions to the American market. Readers must puzzle out
hundreds of local words like khatri (denoting a commercial caste),
alaap (introduction to a raga) and nimbu paani (drink made of fresh
lime juice and soda) without a glossary. The central story thread -- a
girl's search for love and marriage -- is spun out without R-rated sex;
no longing for the lost British raj seeps through the page, as it does
in the popular novels of Paul Scott or M. M. Kaye. It's a saga of
modern India with a virtually all-Indian cast.
The monsoon of publicity surrounding "A Suitable Boy" hits the United
States this month, pushed by a tailwind of rave reviews from England.
The odd versatility of Seth's career, with its genre-to-genre skips and
jumps, will likely receive closer study. No longer an economist on
holiday or an amateur of the lied, he has become the lionized author of
a big-money book. HarperCollins paid a $600,000 advance, and is backing
it up with a $200,000 marketing campaign in hopes that "A Suitable Boy"
may become the first novel ever to break through as a best seller with
a $30 price tag.
In the opinion of Kushwant Singh, India's best-known journalist and
critic, "Seth will dominate Indian literature as long as he chooses to
live here." But will he translate for Americans who, unlike the
British, share no East-meets-West colonial history with the
subcontinent? And is his voice strong enough to sustain the hope, love,
jealousy, anger of a Schubert or a Tolstoy over the course of an
epic-length novel? Is Seth an overreaching dilettante or is he really
great?
"ON THE WHOLE I DON'T like reading long books," he confesses over
drinks in a hotel bar the next evening. "I'm not a fan of 'Ulysses.'
And I haven't quite finished 'War and Peace.' Once the story of Pierre
and Natasha was over, and I reached the epilogue where he writes about
history this and that, I thought, 'Dear Leo, please forgive me, I loved
your book but this was the ending for me.' "
Quietly self-assured, his Anglo-educated tongue purring his syllables,
Seth is anything but ponderous or woolly-minded. A polite wit imbues
most topics of conversation. Trim and fit, he gives the impression of
being mainly head, with large dark eyes and a shock of receding black
hair. As he thinks about a question, a look of concern often creases
the bridge of his nose; but he can quickly break a leaden mood with a
wide grin, as though reminding himself -- and his interrogator -- to
lighten up. The recital has left him looking a bit drained, but his
scarf is still worn with Byronic flair over his shoulder.
"Do remember that I was an economist and I had so much work to do," he
says, citing several other classics he has not gotten around to. "I'm
not well-read among novelists." Lyric poetry, on the other hand, he can
recite by the hour. "Unless you can remember a few lines of it, what's
the point?"
A bright and amused spirit, seldom torn by extreme emotion, informs his
writing as well. His artistic heroes -- Mozart, Pushkin, Jane Austen --
reflect a nature more in step with enlightenment values than modernist
experimentation. Everything Seth has published relies on clarity and
wordplay, on passion and anxiety bridled by classical forms.
His three books of poems, all of them metered or rhymed, as well as
"From Heaven Lake" and "A Suitable Boy," are addressed to the general
reader. "I want my books to sell, to be read," he says. "I'm not
interested in being obscure." Two years ago, taking a break from his
novel, he collected animal fables from India, China, Greece and the
Ukraine, reworking them in verse in the style of La Fontaine. "My main
motivation is not to get bored," he says, analyzing his protean output.
"I'm just hoping I get a vaguely maverick reputation."
The Indian press, while impressed by Seth the writer, has treated the
man with less respect. One profile writer referred to his reputation
for being "selfish," "bloody minded" and "friendless." Even people who
have known him for years find him unpredictable. Prasenjit Duara,
professor of history at the University of Chicago and a schoolmate of
Seth's from India, describes him as "very charming but not that
accessible. He's full of repartee and fun. But he keeps a personal
distance. He can treat you like a king one moment and then cut you down
the next."
Seth believes that his years of sequestered labor on "A Suitable Boy,"
when he didn't speak to journalists and saw few friends, has given him
an undeserved bad name. His brow wrinkles and his voice registers
distress as he answers the charges. "This book has gouged out my 30's.
I don't want to spend my 40's so isolated. That's one of the reasons I
want to write plays, which take less time and are very intense and put
me in touch with people. I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I'm
not. I'm just obsessed with my work."
UNMARRIED, WITH good friends scattered across India, England, the East
and West coasts of the United States ("I'm a private rather than a
friendless man"), Seth has lived with his parents since 1987 when he
returned from California. Like most Indian families, his is close-knit,
with a vast network of relatives in the North, from Uttar Pradesh (on
his mother's side) and in the part of the Punjab that is now Pakistan
(on his father's).
"A Suitable Boy" is in some sense the story of this family. The main
action takes place in the same year, 1951, that Prem and Leila Seth
were married and conceived their first son: Vikram. (They also have a
younger son, Shantum, and a daughter, Aradhana, recently married to an
Austrian diplomat stationed in Washington.) Although many of the
characters are composites of people Seth has known or heard about, his
father, for one, reads it as largely a roman a clef. Numerous
acquaintances or friends of the author have in one way or another found
their way into his fiction.
Seth admits to using actual people as the basis for his new book.
"Every novelist does," he says. "But then the characters come into
contact with those they would never meet in real life, and they change
quite considerably." At least one character, however, is clearly
recognizable: an opinionated scholar based on Dr. Ila Chatto padhyay, a
family friend who had steered him toward mathematics and economics in
his early academic life.
This is a book in which you must orient yourself by tracing the
branches of four family trees -- the Mehras, Kapoors, Khans and
Chatterjis -- printed on the endpapers. The central character, Lata, is
a 19-year-old college student whose mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, takes it
upon herself to find her daughter a suitable husband. The plot, as in
Jane Austen, revolves around Lata and her suitors, but the richness of
the book comes from the hundreds of interactions between families and
friends, brought together as passing strangers or made enemies by
legal, religious, musical, literary, economic and social institutions.
"A Suitable Boy" bears out a truism of Indian society: that at a
certain level everyone seems to know everyone else.
Unlike Dickens or the 19th-century Russian novelists, Seth has drawn
his characters exclusively from the middle and upper classes. Cultural
more than economic differences separate the families, with key
individuals of each clan bringing them together. He doesn't object to
the label "soap opera" as a description of the plot. "I used to be
hooked on 'Dynasty,' " he says. "I used to sit there with my mouth
open, wondering what would happen next."
The panoramic view of Indian society in the book was accidental. What
he had in mind was a series of short novels, covering the period from
the 50's to the 90's, rather than a doorstop about a transition in
Indian history. He began with a scene between Lata and Mrs. Mehra,
wrote for several months, and discovered that he didn't know enough
about his characters. "I had opened the door partly wide and there were
all these people walking into this huge drawing room and I didn't have
anything to feed them. They were strolling around uncontrollably. It
took me a long time to familiarize myself with the time, and then with
the professions, activities, events -- these geographies of the mind."
To research his book, Seth spent months among old newspapers from the
period, brushed up on his Urdu, visited tanneries, interviewed anyone
who had frequented courtesans during the heyday of the Nawabs, before
independence. The city of Brahmpur in the book is an amalgam of Delhi,
Lucknow, Agra, Benares, Patna and Ajodhya. ("I realized quite early on
that I would run into trouble if I didn't create my own city.")
Seth is fastidious about facts, especially those pertaining to natural
history. The ornithology and seasonal foliage changes in the book were
checked for accuracy with various sources. (After dinner one night, he
directs our taxi to a former home of his parents in New Delhi, a
generous loan from the state when his mother was acting chief justice
of the Delhi High Court. We patrol the grounds in the dark as he
identifies each tree -- "laburnum, ashok, ficus, eucalyptus, neem" --
in a performance of his knowledge.)
To meet the source for much of his material, Seth invites me to Sunday
lunch at his parents' house in Noida, a suburb across the Jumna River
from New Delhi. Three stories on a small plot of land in a new
development, hammers pinging rock on construction sites all around, it
is the first house they have ever owned. "They are salaried people and
could never afford to live in Delhi," according to Seth. Like most
middle-class Indian households, however, they have a small staff of
servants, one of whom answers the door and leads me to the sitting room.
Dressed in traditional kurta-pyjama -- a collarless shirt and baggy
trousers -- Vikram reintroduces his parents (we had shaken hands at the
recital and at a cocktail party) before leading me on a tour. Prem Seth
is warm, casual, outgoing as befits one who traveled widely for his
shoe company. Leila Seth, dressed in a saffron sari with a red tikka
mark on her forehead, is more reserved, like her son. Half of the first
floor seems devoted to her brown-spined law library, which extends from
a study into the hall. The first female chief justice of the state High
Court in the neighboring state of Himachal Pradesh, where they lived
until retiring to Noida, she has a reputation as a singular intellect.
"We had long discussions," says his father during our vegetarian meal.
"I was often amazed at the questionnaire that he had prepared for me.
If I answered one way, he would come back and tell me that I had
answered another way on another day."
"Techniques of economic surveying," Seth explains. "Getting
consistency."
On an upper floor shared with his younger brother, in rooms that
recently belonged to his sister, Seth shows me where he finished his
book. Some days he worked 16 or 17 hours, some days not at all. He
began by hand, developed cramps and tried therapy ("I baked my hand, I
froze my hand"), switched to a laptop, dictated to a friend and
concluded again with a pen. He likes to write in bed, often after
rising "at the crack of noon. I need about 10 or 11 hours. I love
sleeping, singing, swimming. All things that begin with S."
To write a book of this magnitude for six years is a costly enterprise:
food and shelter from parents can relieve financial wear and tear.
(Seth would come down for meals or have a servant leave them at his
door.) As he points out, the book was a risky and uncontracted venture
until last year when publishers saw it and began bidding. He returned
to India after "The Golden Gate" because he couldn't afford to support
himself as a writer anywhere else. And unlike many siblings, the Seth
children -- away at boarding school, in England or America -- were
never really together until the last few years.
"It has been good for all of us to be home when we weren't called back
for an emergency," Seth says on the porch of his room. The book not
only reflects this privileged time together -- it is dedicated to his
parents and to the memory of his grandmother -- but imagines a
prehistory of his own existence and that of his siblings, of an Indian
world that shaped but by no means determined the fate of Vikram Seth.
"I DON'T REMEMBER much about my early life," he says over dinner one
evening. "I know that I was not wanted. It was too early in the
marriage. They couldn't afford me." Two years after his birth in
Calcutta in 1952, the family moved to London when his father was
transferred by his Czech employer. It was there that his mother, on a
whim, began to study law. "It could be done with minimal attendence,"
as she puts it. "She came first in the bar exam in England, for both
men and women," says her proud son.
When they moved back to India in 1957, Vikram showed prodigal math and
verbal abilities (early on he spoke both Hindi and English), and became
a 6-year-old boarder at the esteemed Welham School in Dehradun. He had
a "relaxed Hindu upbringing," saying his prayers until he was 8 or 9,
before stopping entirely. Ganesh, the genial elephant-headed god of
learning and good fortune, seems to be the favored deity of the Seth
household.
After Welham, like so many of India's best and brightest, including
Indira Gandhi's two sons, Seth attended the highly exclusive and
expensive Doon School. While other countries have several exclusive
preparatory institutions, most of India's top bureaucrats, businessmen,
editors, writers, scholars and well-bred sportsmen were channeled
through Doon. It is Eton and Phillips Exeter and the Lycee Henri IV
rolled into one.
In this talented group, Seth quickly became a legend. Classmates speak
about him with a kind of awe. "He was a star, way ahead of everyone in
his class, and he wasn't just good at one thing," says Devajyoti Ghose,
now professor of economics at the University of Arizona.
Memories of Seth at Doon and Seth's own memories seem strangely at
odds. Last year in a controversial address at Founders Day, he voiced
his divided feelings about the place: appreciation for the superb
education he had received and lingering bitterness toward his
classmates. "For years after I left I thought of school as a kind of
jungle, and looked back on it with a shudder," he told a stunned
audience used to hearing fond reminiscences from old "Doscos," as Doon
alums are called.
"I was teased and bullied by my classmates and my seniors because of my
interest in studies and reading, because of my lack of interest in
games, because of my unwillingness to join gangs and groups, because of
my height -- and, most importantly of all -- because I would get so
furious when I was bullied. No doubt, if in my teens I had been more
relaxed about things, or if I had had more of a sense of humor, things
wouldn't have been so bad. But I wasn't, and I didn't, and they were."
Seth never mentioned his unhappiness to his parents. "They made
enormous sacrifices to send me," he says. "They've never had a lot of
money. Sending me to Doon was perhaps the best investment they ever
made."
At Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he took a degree in philosophy,
politics and economics, Seth began to write poetry ("most of it was
awful"), learn Chinese, and develop his longstanding love of Bach and
Indian classical music. Akeel Bilgrami, an associate professor of
philosophy at Columbia, was an Oxford classmate with similar musical
tastes. He remembers Seth as "always very serious and withdrawn, not
your standard academic-type on the make."
After a year back in India ("I wanted to study cattle development
schemes, and I was homesick"), and a last year at Oxford, Seth entered
Stanford in 1975 for graduate studies in economics and found bliss.
"For the first time in my life I found that I could enjoy myself.
Stanford is a very tolerant place. And the thing that I feared -- that
I would only find thick-headed beach boys -- wasn't true at all." He
credits the people he met there, and the California sunshine, with
teaching him "how to have fun."
One of the Americans he studied with, the poet Timothy Steele, has
become one of Seth's closest friends and a kind of mentor. "The Golden
Gate" bears a dedication to him ("If anything in this engages/By verse,
veracity, or vim/You know whom I must credit, Tim") and Steele read "A
Suitable Boy" from the earliest drafts. They found that they shared a
respect for traditional forms.
"There is a wonderful Mozartean fluency about all of Vikram's work,"
says Steele, who also disputes the charge that Seth is remote. "I've
always found him warm and funny, and with this novel you see the happy
situation of someone exploiting his talents in newer ways but always
drawing on resources that were there at the very beginning."
Seth's first book of poems, "Mappings," came out in 1980 while he was
at Nanjing University in China doing research for his dissertation. The
task of interviewing families in seven villages to find out the social
impact of state policies in the countryside helped to prepare for his
novel. When he hitchhiked home to New Delhi via Tibet from Nanjing in
1981, he kept a journal that became "From Heaven Lake."
"The Golden Gate" also resulted from his China experience. To avoid
processing the data he had collected, Seth began a verse novel back at
Stanford about five friends and lovers, borrowing a stanzaic form from
Charles Johnston's translation of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin." Again, the
characters, including a Silicon Valley executive, a gay Catholic and a
Japanese-American artist, have some basis in his own life. (He won't
say how much.) But the triumph of the book comes from its cunning pop
rhythms and slangy rhymes ("manana" with "iguana") embedded in a
contemporary romance that expresses deep affection for California
culture.
Though Liz was brought up marinading
Near the jacuzzis of Marin,
She never reveled in parading
Her heart, her knowledge, or her skin.
She bloomed unhardened by her beauty,
Immune to 'Lizzie, you're a cutie!'
Though doting aunt and bleating beau
Reiterated it was so.
Turned down by virtually every poetry editor in New York, the
manuscript finally landed with Anne Freedgood at Random House, who saw
its virtues -- as did most reviewers. John Hollander in The New
Republic called it a "a minor masterpiece, a tour de force of the
transcendence of the mere tour de force." Women threw flowers at Seth
during readings; rumors abounded that the bisexual in the book was a
self-portrait. Written up in Playboy and People, a guest on talk shows,
he grew wary of the kind of fame that America can instantly bestow.
Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship but with little money coming in as an
editor at Stanford University Press, Seth shipped his library back to
India and took an entirely new tack, several in fact.
"I do feel like a writer now," he says. "Finally. But I don't think
I'll write another novel. At least not soon."
REVIEWS OF "A Suitable Boy" in India have generally been harsher than
in England, with objections centered on the hype surrounding
publication and on the prose, much less sparkling than the poetic verve
of "The Golden Gate." India Today called the style of the novel "bland"
and "mundane." The reviewer for The Economic Times complained: "The
book has length, but lacks the sweep, the majesty, the range and the
insight of the great books." The Sunday Times of London, on the other
hand, called it "massive and magnificent."
Recent articles in Time and the British press have linked Seth to a
trend whereby the most ambitious novels in English now seem to issue
from writers raised in cultures outside the United Kingdom. Half of the
last dozen winners of the annual Booker Prize, the British
Commonwealth's most prestigious and monitored literary prize, have come
from former colonies.
A strong contender for the Booker, "A Suitable Boy" fits this profile,
although its author shares little with Ben Okri or Michael Ondaatje or
Salman Rushdie except a non-English birth. More conservative in his
narrative approach than his contemporaries, Seth draws on literary
traditions that many have discarded. Even though Philip Larkin insulted
him behind his back in his posthumous collection of letters (along with
most foreigners), Seth admired and exchanged letters with the
misanthropic poet. Their mutual dislike for avant-gardism of any sort
separates them from many of their peers.
"I see myself as part of a movement in terms of simultaneity of event
but not necessarily of common causation," Seth says. "But I'm sure that
every particle of gas in Brownian motion sees itself as an independent
entity."
Many of India's most celebrated native-born writers -- Rushdie, Nirad
Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh -- have either left for good or
now live most of the time outside the country. For the next few years
Seth wants to learn the craft of playwrighting in either London or New
York. But he plans to winter in India and one day buy a house in Noida
not far from his parents. More than other writers of his stature, he
seems based in India.
Despite its dependence on the European novel, "A Suitable Boy" is
something of a patriotic statement. Together with his agents in England
and the United States, and in intense consultations with Penguin Books
India, Seth has overseen every stage of his book's production and
marketing. One afternoon he leads me up flights of stairs to a dingy
office in a business complex where the book was typeset. There isn't
much to see except young men rattling away on their computers under bad
fluorescent lights, their desks stacked with manuscripts. But Seth is
proud that the English, American and Canadian editions of his book were
typeset in India. Sometimes he came here at night to check galleys as
they eased out of the laser printers.
One subplot of the book -- the difficult friendship between the sons of
the Khans and the Kapoors -- clearly reflects a bitter religious issue
that has divided India since independence. In his reaction to the
razing of a Muslim mosque by Hindu fundamentalists last December, which
led to weeks of religious violence that left thousands dead in cities
all over India, Seth becomes uncharacteristically inarticulate. "It's .
. . it's . . . I was so upset. When I read the headlines I was sick to
my stomach."
There is an uncanny replica of this event in "A Suitable Boy" -- same
issues, same result, but set more than 40 years earlier. Seth claims
not to find any comfort in this testament to his fictional powers. "It
was a most unhappy prefiguration of events. The mosque and the temple
theme was not so big when I wrote it a few years ago. That it should
have come to this was unimaginable. What it must feel like to be a
non-Hindu in this country, how insecure it must make you feel. Many,
many, many Hindus are shocked and ashamed."
Usually unstirred by politics and not much of a newspaper reader, Seth
joined others in denouncing the rise of "communalism" and the
agitations of the Bharatiye Janata Party, which was planning a march on
New Delhi during my visit. "I'm not a big one for signing petitions,
but in this case I felt I had to." He acted similarly a few years ago
against Muslim fundamentalists. "I have spoken my mind on Rushdie," he
says. "The fatwa is a disgrace."
After lunch at his parents' house, Seth leads me to visit his father's
sister in the chowk (marketplace) near the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque).
It is the area of old Delhi where thousands of people, Muslim and
Hindu, live stacked atop one another in a maze of alleyways, a common
urban arrangement in India and one that always bubbles with dense
activity. A flash point for the riots, its thoroughfares are patrolled
by soldiers who carry old-issue carbines and loiter in the afternoon
sun. Seth lived here for a brief period to transmit its atmosphere into
the book.
Climbing several sets of stairs, we enter a dark room where his aunt,
her son and grandson, along with four or five more distant relatives
have been watching television. (Even the poorest people in India seem
to have satellite hookup.) They speak in Hindi, catching up on family
news, pulling out clippings from newspapers and magazines that trumpet
Vikram's success. Pride can be seen on their faces and reflected in
his. Shyly, they ask him to autograph one of the articles. His distance
from his family seems as obvious as his connection to them.
Left out of the conversation loop, I am reduced to watching television.
The program -- a cricket test between India and England in which the
colony thrashed the empire in every match -- is an apt fadeout on a
writer whose 19th-century narrative proceeds at a drawn-out,
gentlemanly pace. Even Seth, who cares little for sports, identifies
with the cricket victory. Although jingoism and aggressive notions of
superiority have never been his style, he seems pleased to have beaten
the English at their own game.
GRAPHIC: Photos: Six years ago, Vikram Seth, right, returned to the
family home and set to work on "A Suitable Boy." He lives with his
younger brother, Shantum; father, Prem, and mother, Leila, in Noida, a
suburb of New Delhi. (pg. 32); Seth in the garden of his parents' home.
"A Suitable Boy," is in some sense the story of his own family. (pg.
34)(Photographs by Raghu Rai/Magnum for The New York Times)
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