Congratulations, Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai has won the Booker Prize!
When The Inheritance of Loss was first published, the fact that was most widely noted was that the novel, Desai’s second, was coming out after a gap of several years. But a truer yardstick by which to measure Desai’s talent is to note the difference between her two works.
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was the work of a young writer; it was charming but derivative, and it was also limited by the aesthetic boundaries it had chosen for itself. The novel’s protagonist was a young man who, once he retreats into the branches of a guava tree, is seen as a holy man with mystical talents. Small-town India seen through magical-realist lens, reminiscent in part of R.K. Narayan (Desai’s protagonist shared his name with one of Narayan’s celebrated characters) and also the latter-day fabulism of Salman Rushdie. It is possible I’m being harsh here but I do believe that the exploration of eccentricity as well as a loose magical-realist form drained the book of any genuine pathos and critical power.
After the passage of eight years, slightly unusual for front-rank novelists writing today, came Desai’s second book. It has very few of the weaknesses of her earlier work, and several strengths that could not easily have been predicted after reading only her first novel. The Inheritance of Loss is an ambitious work, ambitious not so much in matters of form, where it still echoes other Indian writers, but in its social canvas. The novel is set in a small hill-town in India of the mid-eighties—but the story is not confined by a narrow sense of time or place. It stands witness to national breakdown as well as the national diaspora; the past and its terrors enjoy as much attention as the chaotic present. This is a story, wittily told, of India’s many classes, their neuroses, their struggles, and the tenuous hopes of those who do not have stable income or identities. The reviews have not remarked on the ways in which the book repeats other novels in its plot-lines or themes, most notably The God of Small Things, the novel which won Arundhati Roy the same prize. In my opinion, the book sets its sights low, detailing a variety of oppressions. Nevertheless, it is not a multicultural text-book; instead, it is marked by invention and joy. In fact, the Inheritance of Loss can be put among the handful of representations of our moment—call it globalization, postmodernity, or contemporary conditions—from the viewpoint of its victims.
