Somini Sengupta met with Vikram Seth in Noida and found out why he needed to write non-fiction instead of a novel. Seth’s Two Lives has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in the autobiography category. (Sengupta also notes: “A narrow glass bookshelf in what Americans would call a living room (in a house like this, it still ought to be called a drawing room) contains Two Lives, sandwiched between Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and V. S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds.” I imagine everyone takes note of the books that writers have on their book shelves. And it is always fascinating to imagine the conversation between the books that share a space only because of the accident of a writer’s taste or something even more purely accidental.)

I like reading interviews with Seth because he is not interested in posturing or in ticking off obvious targets. You might want to listen to Seth’s webcast-interview with SAJA. And, could I also direct you to an interview in Outlook magazine? In the course of this interview Seth responds in the only way one can to the reporter’s maddening, infantile obsession with advances instead of literary worth. Here’s a slice of the relevant exchange:

Outlook: You described the advance for A Suitable Boy as ludicrous. What do you think of the record-smashing one you got for Two Lives?

Seth: Considering that I didn’t have a track record before A Suitable Boy, and I couldn’t imagine who would read the book, let alone who would publish it or review it, I thought it was absurd. I mean, it changed my life thank god, it got me out of debt and did various other things. And certainly helped in the supply of books to my mother and more importantly, perhaps, whisky to my father for life. But I was rather shocked by it, quite frankly. As it happened, I was wrong about it being ludicrous because it earned it out very quickly.

Outlook: And were you shocked by the advance you got for Two Lives.

Seth: Er, much less so, less so because I can see at least… It may have been larger, but this at least had a track record so I can kind of understand why the publishers might offer that. You see, I don’t mean it from a publisher’s point of view, or an economist’s point of view or whatever rather than the writer’s point of view.

Outlook [to Seth’s mother]: So were you surprised that the family memoir you suggested to Vikram got such a large advance?

Seth [interrupting]: The last thing Mama was thinking of when she suggested the subject was the advance. This is the last time you are going to use that word, advance.