R.K. Narayan
Wyatt Mason in the New Yorker celebrates the new editions of four of R.K. Narayan’s books. I’m looking forward to the winter break because I want to read what Michael Gorra, Monica Ali, Pankaj Mishra, and Jhumpa Lahiri have to say in their respective forewords to the books: Malgudi Days, The Painter of Signs, The Ramayana, and The Guide. Mason writes in his essay:
In outline, “The Dark Room” has similarities to Richard Yates’s first novel, “Revolutionary Road” (1961). Both tell the sadly familiar story of a philandering businessman husband and a miserable homemaker wife. Yates documents the psychological steps—difficult childhood, disappointing adolescence, missteps in adulthood and marriage—that lead the wife, April Wheeler, to end her life. Narayan, by contrast, tells us little of Savitri’s childhood, nor, for that matter, of conditions beyond those of the objective, present moment surrounding the central event of the novel—the night when Savitri abandons her husband and seeks, down by the river, a better place for herself in the universe:
“She rose and stepped down. There was still one step, the very last submerged under water, very slippery with moss; and then one felt the sand under one’s feet; water reached up to one’s hips, and as one went further down, to one’s breasts; and now the running water tripped up one’s legs from behind. She stood in the water and prayed to her God on the Hill to protect the children. . . . The last sensation that she felt was a sharp sting as the water shot up her nostrils, and something took hold of her feet and toppled her over.”
Unlike April Wheeler’s act in “Revolutionary Road,” Savitri’s is averted. A man sees her being swept away and leaps in to save her. By novel’s end, Savitri has returned home to her husband, to serve him as before. There, she is no less miserable, no more fulfilled. Nothing changes. For the Western reader accustomed to the psychological novel of action and outcome, such a story can seem oddly unsatisfying. Western novels about women whose lives are denied free exercise of will—Anna Karenina; Emma Bovary; Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth”; Florence Dowell in “The Good Soldier”; Edna Pontellier in “The Awakening”—have often charted a progression of cause and effect that makes comprehensible, even inevitable, a woman’s final, metaphorical flight to the river. But in Narayan’s world, while there is the same impulse to slough off one’s bonds, it is always without outlet. Indeed, in Narayan’s early novels his protagonists—Swaminathan in “Swami and Friends,” Chandran in “The Bachelor of Arts”—are all trapped by, and strain against, existential bonds that prove unbreakable. All try to flee their frustratingly narrow lives by running away from home, but, like pigeons to their coops, they cannot help returning. In their very form, these novels, in which conflict finds neither psychological justification nor narrative resolution, register “Indian problems” with a cartographer’s watchtower remove: Narayan is showing us the shape of a people being strangled by the contour of their land.
What do those last dozen words mean? I don’t know. The phrase “Indian problems” is V.S. Naipaul’s. They don’t find much favor with Mason. Although I like his more imaginative response to Narayan, and also his effort to engage with the writer formally, I’d prefer to stay away from the clammy mysteries embraced by Mason. In his understanding of why lives found very little resolution, Naipaul’s materialist grasp is mordant and precise. Here is a line, which I very much like, from Among the Believers:
I had been born in a static colonial time; and in Trinidad, where I spent my first eighteen years, I had known the poverty and spiritual limitations of an agricultural colony where, as was once computed, there were were only eighty kinds of job.
