The White Tiger

For sometime I’ve felt that some of the best novelists writing in English are Indians.  Just as the Irish dominated English literature in the early part of the 20th century,  with Yeats, Joyce and Shaw, I feel the Indians are using the English language to advance literature, to make the novel their own.  Writers like Vikram Seth, seemed to honor the tradition and imitate the great novels of the Victorian age.  His great book, “A Suitable Boy” explored and exhausted the limits of traditional fiction.  After that, he went on to write a much more modern (and I think, lesser) book, the muted and interior, “An Unequal Music”.  It is beautifully written, but in the end, slight.  The heartbreaking fiction of Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy and Rupa Bajwa deal with the pressure of  events and circumstances on people’s lives, rather like early 20th century American fiction.  Now, Aravind Adiga has raised the bar with a groundbreaking, disturbing work, “The White Tiger.”  Rightly compared to Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” Adiga’s book is more humorous but no less bitter.  It is also suspenseful and gripping.  At first I didn’t like his decision to write the book as a letter of confession, but that narrative device quickly diminishes in importance as the story is told.  Once I read a few chapters, I couldn’t put it down.  It rings with moral authority but is also just a good story.  Thanks to India, the novel lives!