Whitaker's Reviews > A Suitable Boy

I know some GR’ers didn’t really cotton on to the style of this book. And maybe it was because I read this while on vacation in India itself, but wow! Just W.O.W! It’s a fucking long book—1,500 pages. And every single page was worth the time I spent on it and more.

If Midnight’s Children is India’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, then A Suitable Boy must be its War and Peace. It’s got the same melding of personal lives seen in amidst great national events. Instead of the romance of Natasha and Pierre, it’s that of Lata and her three suitors. Instead of the war with France, we have the post-Independence and post-Partition politics of a nation searching for an identity. And instead of descriptions of war, we get exchanges of heated debate on the floor of the state parliament, and the passing of a contentious bill.

Seth looks at the lives of four families intertwined by marriage and friendship. And all the detail—and it is indeed loving detail—is very very necessary to immerse you in the India of the 1950s, and what it felt like to be alive then. We get details of village life, life in the city, life of the different castes, business life, religious life, modern life, traditional life. It’s all there. And it works in tandem with several great stories of love and passion, and what these mean, both at the level of family, romance, and nation.

Word has it that Seth is working on a follow up (not sure if it’s a sequel as such) to be called “A Suitable Girl”. I, for one, can’t wait.