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 that Indian writers are using the English language to advance literature, to make the novel their own. Much of our contemporary fiction seems interior, airless; the art of telling a good story seems sometimes to be lost in this country. However, in India, writers like Vikram Seth, seem 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. 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!