A Suitable Boy (thoughts)

You know, whenever I read a book that’s over 1,000 pages, I find myself at a loss to review it. I ended up not doing full reviews of War and Peace or Les Miserables last year, and now I find myself behind in reviewing both A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth and Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset.

That being said, I’m going to try to review A Suitable Boy today! The book is over 1,400 pages long, and I absolutely loved it until the last hundred pages (I didn’t like the ending of one of my fave characters, although the more I think about it the more I accept it-it didn’t ruin the book for me or antyhing though!). It’s a modern novel, so it doesn’t include the philosophical asides of War and Peace or Les Mis, but it did remind me of them both in that there was a huge canvas with all sorts of characters and plots. The book teemed with life! There are Muslim families and Hindu families, there are courtesans and young star-crossed lovers and grieving widows and newlyweds. There are births and deaths, triumphs and failures, good deeds and evils ones, political campaigns and mass riots. In other words, there’s a little something of everything and it would be impossible for me to tell you more than that!

Seth has a marvelous writing style. It’s very immediate and direct, with a sort of wry humour. He’s also rather adept at couplets; the table of contents is written in couplets, and one of the main families in the book speak to each other in random rhymes. Speaking of that family, they reminded me a bit of J.D. Salinger’s the Glass family, only without all the tragedy. The children were in their twenties, and they were all rich and rather spoiled, very intelligent and witty, but casting around for a real purpose to their lives. They made me smile quite a bit! I said earlier that the book covers pretty much everything in life, and it does, but several of the central characters are in their late teens and twenties, so there’s quite a bit of coming-of-age plots going on. As a twenty-three-year-old myself, I identified with these characters (even though most were wildly different from me!), and it was nice to see them struggling for a ‘life purpose’ since it made me feel less alone. ;) That being said, there are so many other stories going on, I don’t want to imply that even the majority of the book deals with those issues-they’re simply the ones that I gravitated towards.

All of the book’s characters felt like real people; Seth made me feel their worries as my own, and never did a character feel stereotypical or as if he was a filler. I could expect to meet even the minor characters at a cocktail party! And while some characters were struggling financially while others were among the economic elite, I would say the book dealt mostly with families who were comfortably off, and there were only a couple visits to ‘slums’, which as readers we saw through the eyes of middle-class characters. I actually really liked this; it seems to me that with movies like Slumdog Millionaire, there’s an impression among some Westerners that all Indians are poor, or that their concerns are light years away from our own. While A Suitable Boy is definitely Indian, it also is universal. At no point did I think of the characters as ‘Them’ or ‘Other’; Seth really brought 1950s India to me, and I’m grateful for that experience.

It’s ironic that this is one of my shorter reviews, since it’s of one the longest books I’m likely to read this year! But I promise that this is everything a chunkster should be, and anyone who enjoys ‘everyday’ stories (i.e.: this isn’t a thriller-type book like Count of Monte Cristo, although there is an attempted murder or two!) will love this one as well. Part of why I love reading international fiction is that I feel like I get to be ‘native’ for a little bit, and A Suitable Boy is the best book I’ve read for that experience. There aren’t any pyrotechnics in the book, no crazy po-mo metaplots or anything. This is just straight-up storytelling at its finest, and I highly recommend it. Like the wonderful chunksters last year, it’s one I intend to reread!

Can you suggest any books that are 1,000 pages or more? Last year, I read War and Peace and Les Mis, this year I read Count of Monte Cristo, A Suitable Boy, and Kristin Lavransdater…so I need some ideas for next year!