You can't write another Middlemarch

It seems unfair to write an entire blog post comparing a book unfavorably to Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, but...Vikram Seth’s novel, A Suitable Boy, virtually begs for such comparisons! This is a book whose structure, plot, and theme strongly resemble the great 19th-century proto-realist novels, and its thirteen-hundred-page length almost demands that the novel be taken as a work of potential genius.

A Suitable Boy is a work of historical fiction, set in 1950, shortly after India’s independence. The book is about a woman, Rupa Mehra, who has four grown children, and who’s trying to find a husband for her third child, Lata. Their family isn’t rich, but they’re solidly bourgeois. They have a shabby-genteel quality. Mehra is the widow of a guy who worked for India Railways; her dad is a doctor. Her eldest son is one of the only Indian managers at a white-owned firm in Calcutta. They’re doing okay.

That’s the problem with the book. Everyone is doing okay. What will happen to Lata if she doesn’t marry well? Probably nothing. She is a student at the local university—if she doesn’t marry, she can teach or perhaps work in the civil service. Mid-20th century India isn’t 19th-century Europe. There are more options for educated women. She has a friend, Malati, who is becoming a doctor and is resolutely against marriage. Lata’s family is not rich, but…if she was an old maid, they could support her indefinitely. There are definitely families in India where being unmarried would be a disaster, but this isn't one of them.

She’s also quite young, still college-aged, and she doesn’t seem too hurried. The inciting event is that she falls in love with a Muslim boy, Kabir, who’s in school with her, and she does ask him to run off with her, but he refuses, and after that there is no serious implication that she might run off or even rebel. Instead she dutifully follows her mother around and meets potential suitors. She ends up with two prospects: Haresh is an orphan who works as an executive at a shoe-manufacturing firm; Amit is the son of a judge, and he’s a well-known poet. Both are nice guys and seem like great prospects.

I know that I’m making the novel seem extremely genteel, but that’s genuinely the experience of reading it. A lot of things happen, but there’s very little danger.

It's astonishing that despite the lack of tension the book is so readable. It's told in hundreds of short chapters, and it’s a very dialogue heavy book, with talky scenes interspersed with brisk narrative summary by an omniscient narrator that attempts to stay as hidden and impersonal as possible, as in the following passage, about life in the women’s quarter of a great Muslim family.

Their world was not busy with great concerns of state, but was essentially a human one. Food, festivals, family relations, objects of use and beauty, these—mainly for good but sometimes for ill—formed the basis, though not the entirety, of their interests. It was not as if they were ignorant of the great world outside. It was rather that the world was seen more heavily filtered through the interests of family and friends than it would be for a sojourner with more direct experience.

(For an example of the dialogue, which is equally readable, look in the footnote.)

This was very pleasant, and I did enjoy the time I spent with the characters. But…I also quite frequently felt like the novel had nothing to say. It described how people live, but…when you have a cast of hundreds, and every single character always manages to narrowly avoid having to make hard decisions, the book starts to feel a little bit vapid. The breadth and heft of the book create the illusion of seriousness, but the book itself has no bite.

This is quite different from Middlemarch (a book that is explicitly referenced near the end of A Suitable Boy)¹. In Middlemarch the conflict comes from the question, “What happens if you marry the wrong person?” Dorothea does this early in the book, she marries Causubon, a scholar who turns out to be a big fake, and who she can’t ultimately respect. Tertius Lydgate, a secondary character, marries Rosamund, who is selfish and status-obsessed, and she pushes him to treat wealthy patients instead of conducting the medical research that he loves. Mary Garth refuses the attentions of Fred Percy because, although she loves him, she is afraid he will be a wastrel, and their life together won’t be good.

In A Suitable Boy it’s almost impossible to make a truly bad decision. Everyone seems more or less well-meaning. When things go wrong, as when Bhaskar (Lata’s nine year old cousin) is lost during a riot—he reappears in the next few chapters. There’s a big subplot in the book regarding the passage of the Zamindari Act, which will take land away from one of the characters, the Nawab of Baitar. But…both his sons have jobs—they’re not worried about money. And the Nawab accepts that his time is over, and he even maintains a friendship with the author of the act, Mahesh Kapoor (the father of Lata’s sister’s husband).

To some of you, this novel might sound fun. Everyone is nice. Everything works out. It sounds like Cold Comfort Farm or Ted Lasso.

But…there’s no coherent worldview here. It’s not that A Suitable Boy believes people are fundamentally good. In fact, the book dismisses political or economic progress. Although politics are a major part of the book, the politicians are quite hapless when it comes to actually helping people. There is a fitful, halting progress towards land redistribution, but political progress isn’t anything that a major character can devote themselves to wholeheartedly (the only people who do, Mahesh Kapoor and Rasheed, end up out of office and dead, respectively). Technological progress is nowhere to be found. As for economic progress, Indian-owned firms are portrayed as hidebound and inefficient, the only decent firms are owned by white people.

Religion too is portrayed as utterly bankrupt. There is a riot at a religious festival that kills a thousand people. The most religious character, Dipankar, after witnessing the riot decides to leave the spiritual path and join a bank instead. Later on, when one character is trying to build a new Shiva temple, the lingam they’re raising collapses and kills several people.

Bad things definitely happen in this book, but, by and large, they don’t affect the major characters. Instead the characters just have a vague desire to lead happy and contented lives, and they pursue plans that would tend to lead to those kinds of lives: Haresh works to impress his bosses at his new firm; Lata picks between two nice men; Varun studies for the civil service exam; Meenakshi goes to parties and slyly has an affair; Kakoli talks on the phone and makes jokey rhyming couplets, teasing her siblings; Tapan has trouble at school, but his brothers rapidly fix it up; Maan has an affair with a courtesan, who sends him off to a village to get rid of him.

It’s not that there isn’t potential drama in these situations—it’s that the drama doesn’t actually occur. Haresh succeeds handily impressing his bosses; Varun gets a spot in the IAS; Meenakshi has a quickie abortion and is never caught cheating; Kakoli marries a white guy, and her enlightened parents are fine with it; and Maan…well, he’s the only discordant note in the whole book.

Maan seems like he’s putting himself together, getting popular with the people of this district, and maybe preparing for a career in politics. Then, through a misunderstanding, he stabs a friend of his and gets imprisoned for attempted murder—a set of events that dominates the final act of the book and seems utterly out of left field and totally not in keeping with the overall tone of the book, especially because Maan hasn't seemed particularly violent until now. However, even this turns out okay in the end—his friend lies to save him, and he is released.

But it’s hard to overstate how random Maan’s storyline seems and how little attempt there is to provide it with any kind of meaning. The book really does abstain from any attempt at providing a coherent worldview.

Middlemarch had that worldview—it believed in political and scientific progress. That’s what inspired both Dorothea and Tertius. They wanted to make the world a better place.

In Anna Karenina, the vision was spiritual. That book actively disclaimed progress: Levin gets involved in the provincial zemstvo council, and he decides it’s not a good use of time. He takes up scientific farming and realizes it’s unsuited for Russia. Eventually he decides that traditional spirituality and the life of the regular peasant constitute the only authentic life.

In A Suitable Boy, the overwhelming impression the book gives off is a desire to be serious, a desire to write a book that will say something deep and true about life in India and life in general. But…that statement simply never comes.

The closest it gets is in the final section, when Lata picks one of the men. As she's making the decision, she considers her sister:

Lata was looking at Savita and thinking: Savita was made to be married. She’s happy to do all the things a house and a family require, all the small and serious things of life... Then the thought struck her that Savita would have loved anyone whom she had married, anyone who was basically a good man, no matter how difficult he was, no matter how different he was from Pran.

This is the core statement of the novel’s themes. The conflict the book is built on—which boy should Lata choose?—is a false conflict. Both boys are fine. She will love whomever she picks. So what is the point of this book then? Why tell this story at all?

It was not unpleasant to read, and I liked many of the character portraits, but I did become bored at various points. This review is quite bittersweet because I spent a long time with these characters, who I certainly came to know well. Some were better drawn than others (Lata always seemed very thin, while her mother and love interests had much more personality, probably because the latter had much more concrete desires than Lata did). I would love to be able to rave about this book, as I did about The Last Samurai, but ultimately this book felt empty, it just felt like an exercise. It didn't seem to have that powerful self-assurance that The Last Samurai or Middlemarch or Anna Karenina possess—that feeling of having some genuine wisdom to impart.

I know fiction writers are no longer expected to impart true wisdom, and oftentimes if a writer can make us believe deeply enough in a specific character, that's enough. But when you adopt a form like this, the capacious proto-realist novel, that is generally marked by a strong ethical worldview, then your own lack of such a worldview is almost guaranteed to show through in a negative way.

At the end of the book, Lata wonders, about Mahesh Kapoor’s wife:

Her thoughts had wandered to the life of this woman, Pran’s mother, whom she had greatly liked but not much known. Had hers been a full life? Could her marriage be said to have been happy or successful or fulfilled: and if so, what did those words mean? What was at the centre of her marriage: her husband, her children, or the small puja room where every morning she prayed, allowing routine and devotion to create a purpose and imply an order in her daily and annual round?

What dooms this book is its inability, after thirteen hundred pages, to provide even a provisional answer to these questions.

I wouldn’t say the book was nihilistic so much as complacent. It’s all in the title. Mrs. Mehra isn’t looking for a great match for her daughter. She doesn’t seek upward mobility or love. She just wants a decent prospect: a suitable boy. A man-shaped person who her daughter will accept. The absence of any ambition on the part of its characters clashed dramatically with the overt ambition of the novel’s length and scope—leading to a sense of vacillation and emptiness.

Reading this book was an eye-opening experience. It’s made me realize that these old forms, although I admire them deeply, sprang from a particular era, when authors felt capable of offering grand prescriptions about how people ought to live. A form comes into the world because it’s suited to what people at a given time and place need to say, and eventually, that time passes, and new forms must come into being.² I hate progress as much as the next Great Books enthusiast, but perhaps some forms truly cannot be resurrected.

Postscripts

• Celine Nguyen
  only read two works of fiction in November: Creation Lake and my novella, “Money Matters”. She much preferred the latter: “I loved [this] novella…It’s 15k words long (the typical novel, for context, is closer to 90k) and has an intensely concentrated and very pure consideration of love, money, sex and sincerity.”

• I do have some paid posts on this Substack. They’re usually about the writing or publishing world. Last Saturday’s post is about why it’s hard to publish reviews of classic novels.

1. Here is Amit, one of the love-interests, fielding questions (from a fan) about his novel-in-progress:

‘Why, then, is it rumoured that your forthcoming novel—to be set, I understand, in Bengal—is to be so long? More than a thousand pages!’ she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.

‘Oh, I don’t know how it grew to be so long,’ said Amit. ‘I’m very undisciplined. But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they’re bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they’re good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch .’

2. Which is not to say we can’t read Middlemarch and Anna Karenina and get something from them nowadays! The author’s conviction still shines through in these books, and through them we can feel the force of those convictions as well. That was the 19th-century’s gift to us. I just think that our own gift to the future will likely look quite different from Middlemarch.