A Suitable Boy.

Vikram Seth has become has become something of a literary hero in recent months, both in his native India and in England. Newspapers have touted the million-pound advance he received for his monumental novel, set in early 1950s' India, and his publishers have trumpeted comparisons with Dickens, George Eliot, and Tolstoy. Seth is one of several brilliant and increasingly visible young Indian writers, and his aspirations match the recent trend (espoused by Tom Wolfe, among others) toward lengthy and ambitious "social" novels in the model of the nineteenth-century masters. Seth appears, in other words, to be riding a wave of expectation for something like a Great Indian Novel. The renewed outbreaks of religious and ethnic violence in India over the last few months make his magnum opus, which describes remarkably similar episodes in the years just after independence, all the more timely. Nor will this novel provoke any fat-was. Seth's grand (perhaps too grand) ambition has been to fit all of India into a novel without offending anybody.

On the surface, A Suitable Boy describes the lives of four large, extended Indian families linked by marriage and friendship. One of those families, the Khans, belong to the zamindari aristocracy, whose feudal privileges were being swept away by land reforms at the time of the novel's setting. Another family, the Brahmin Chatterjis, contains the first Indian High Court justice; the third is fathered by a powerful minister of revenue who is also a member of the national Legislative Assembly. The fourth family, lacking such obvious distinctions, nonetheless contains one of the first Indian executives (a "brown Sahib") in a high-profile British management firm. Seth grounds his fiction, in other words, in some of the most important political and social issues of the day. Nehru himself becomes a character (albeit a minor one) and lengthy speeches from the Legislative Assembly are quoted verbatim.

Nonetheless, Seth's novel is far less concerned with political struggles than with the smaller dramas of everyday life. The story is set, after all, not during the struggle for independence but afterwards, during a period of relative peace and stability. There are crises, for the four families of A Suitable Boy, but none of them explodes into melodrama. An adulterous affair threatens chaos, but then fizzles out peacefully; a heartbroken young man considers suicide, but ends up spending a month in the country instead. Seth appears to be bent on showing us the interstices of social change, the way that life and love will go on no matter what history may be up to. It is hardly surprising when Lata, the novel's central character, does indeed find a suitable boy to marry.

This emphasis on the redeeming aspects of private life is in keeping with Seth's prior work. His first novel, The Golden Gate, described the joys and sorrows of three twenty-something characters in San Francisco. Far more limited in scope than A Suitable Boy, it was nevertheless an ambitious book: the prospect, Seth tells us, of a novel composed of sequential sonnets was enough to send both editors and friends away in disgust. But the critics raved; Gore Vidal promptly dubbed it "the great Californian novel." Seth's verbal gift was supple enough to capture even the most fragmentary conversations, and to range in tone from charming doggerel at the outset to redemptive tragedy in the novel's final pages.

In A Suitable Boy Seth appears to have bitten off more than he can chew. His plot, weaving back and forth toward India's first general election, insists on taking a glimpse of almost every issue that might conceivably have a bearing on that event: religion, law, business, changing cultural traditions. Even the drudgeries of life in a remote northern village are given their fullest possible expression. But the farther Seth roams from his central, high-caste characters, the more his prose tends to sound like a museum-tour: dry, passionless, and analytical.

To some extent these failings are the result of Seth's desire to be fair, to offer a balanced portrait of the nation that will respect all the parties involved. He could not be more different, in this respect, from Salman Rushdie, whose 1980 novel Midnight's Children also takes postindependence India as its subject, and Indian family life as its vehicle. Midnight's Children shuttles wildly back and forth in time, presenting a feverish, supernatural vision of Indian life and society. The narrator, who was born at the very second of independence, literally becomes the voice of modern India; he has none of the calm detachment that marks Seth's novel. He is cursed, wounded, and finally castrated by the forces that were set in motion at his birth, and the magical realism of his narration represents a desperate effort to make sense of those forces. That effort ends, with the novel, in a terrifying vision of apocalypse. The book makes no effort, in other words, to build bridges or to present a "balanced" view. Its very form would appear to mock that possibility in a country so torn by extremism and hatred. Rushdie leaves us, in the end, with nothing more than a painfully vivid impression.

If A Suitable Boy, fails to achieve such vividness, that is probably because Seth is after different quarry. A former doctoral student in economics who abandoned demography for literature, Seth treats his characters with a gentle concern, and is unwilling to sacrifice them (or their future) to blazing language or dramatic conclusions. A Suitable Boy makes no effort to shock its readers, or even to dazzle them. It aims instead at a vast, comprehensive unity; and it focuses on those aspects of life that hold society together rather than those that tear it apart. In that sense Seth seems to have moved self-consciously beyond the jarring, fragmentary aesthetics of most "postmodern" fiction. All the same, it's hard to get through A Suitable Boy without wishing for more action, a faster pace, and a stronger story. Moderation and fairness are necessary virtues in India's current crisis; but they are not of much value in a novel.