Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga’s 2008 debut novel, The White Tiger, has garnered outrageously ecstatic reviews as well as harsh dismissals, which is not surprising considering its situation as a Booker-winning entry which covers the son of a rickshaw-puller, the father dying in an untended hospital, the son eventually “besting” the upper class at their own game: violence, corruption, hypocrisy, and smug self-regard. My own appraisal leans more toward the grousing reviewers, even while granting the first-person Balram his due as an interesting narrator.

Let’s start with those props. The underdog isn’t your typical fictional victim who gathers easy sympathy as he suffers through circumstantial and psychic pain. Balram, sly and duplicitious almost from the outset, manages to work himself up from unemployed (and seemingly unemployable) penury to a situation as chauffeur to the dominant family in his region, while eavesdropping on, and getting clues from, his politically-connected and knee-capping bosses (the father, the often-absent hard-line son, and Balram’s direct boss, the weak-willed other son, Mr. Ashok). A delightful base from which to investigate many social angles: the caste system as its presently experienced; the flux of India’s modernism, with attendant confusion vis-a-vis the West and Indian tradition; and, as Adiga’s mixed, titular metaphor plays out, the nature of the downtrodden, which is to default to the “rooster coop of Indian society”, since any servant who tries to buck the vertical alignment invariably has violence and death meted out to his or her extended family.

Balram is a curious mix of obsequiousness and cunning, and the novel is a great ride, till the half-way point, with tense relationships and uncertainty (even though Adiga tips off the climax, in a postmodern declaration, early on). Unfortunately, those same relationships solidify into a cartoonish force of (to use Adiga’s relentless, stated opposition) Light and Darkness. Balram’s specific masters become caricatures, and their political friends – though described in biting physical detail reminiscent of some of Saul Bellow’s damning character portraits – are likewise too broad, too outlined with doctrinaire faults, to become invested in seriously.

There are other problems. The novel is structured as a vocal musing to a soon-to-be-visiting Chinese premier, which, though it allows for some humorous ruminations on the ideology of developing nations overturning their also-ran status (while noting the very different political histories of, and cultural responses to, modernity in each country), also highlights a not-infrequent (and major) fault of novels which use a first-person narrator. Like Jonathan Franzen’s ponderous and overrated Freedom, I don’t believe the speaker’s lexical and grammatical proficiency. (In Franzen’s novel, the co-protagonist, Patty Berglund, is a sagacious and meticulous self-examiner of vice and folly who can spin serpentine sentences, though she’s depicted in the greater narrative as a jock with limited education and educational desire.) Balram tells premier Jiabao that his English is poor, and the novel certainly corroborates this, as the protagonist learns the language through lurid headlines and newspaper shockers. When his masters really want to speak privately in front of him, they speak in direct English (which Balram then relates faithfully), but more importantly, and with more skill than Patty Berglund, Balram creates some finely-turned poetic descriptions of Delhi street life, cockroach movement, and character idiosyncrasies.

Adiga gets to have and eat his cake. The bosses are overthrown, but the new boss just becomes a slightly more just oppressor, or, even worse, though I could be misreading Adiga, a hopeful precursor to a cutthroat entrepreneurial future that has as its political calling a consumerist corruption rather than caste-entrenched corruption. As an upper-middle-class Indian himself, Adiga is to be applauded for dumping on his own in this fashion, but as the novel plays out, it’s hard not to see the entire enterprise as an assuagement of class guilt. At the novel’s close, in the reversal of fortune, Balram’s new chauffeurs may be treated with more compassion, but the reader still doesn’t hear them in their own words. And of course, we don’t know what happens to Balram’s invisible family after his crime.

The story is a semi-diverting peg on which to clip (and display to the masses) the oft-rewashed bloomers of sympathy for the oppressed. The ideology becomes overbearing and simplistic. Though the ambition is noted, I prefer messages or ideas to have slightly sexier undergarments.

Catherine Bush's Accusation

Novels and non-fictive explorations about Western professionals challenged by shifting their work overseas have a long and (in tone) varied history. John Hersey’s Hiroshima is a dispassionate recording of a horrific event; Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost is a semi-hallucinatory novel about an archaeologist’s efforts at exhuming a victim of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war; and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is a hilarious account of a journalist’s misadventures which proves the Peter Principle. In these, and other, novels, the exotic locale acts as metaphysical challenge to the protagonist (the challenge in the first book above is specifically for the reader).

Like Scoop, Catherine Bush’s 2013 Accusation is a novel about a journalist at sea in an alien world of fact or fiction. Though Waugh’s novel’s protagonist was also based on a reporter in Addis Ababa (Bush’s protagonist travels to that city, as well), the similarities between the two books end there.

Bush’s narrator comes in contact with a charismatic and forceful black man who founded and managed a boys’ and girls’ circus company. Sara is drawn into sympathetic curiosity with this man (Raymond) when she finds out he’s been accused of abusing his young charges. The impetus, the reason for the sympathy? Sara, herself, had once been falsely accused, and charged (the case was dropped for lack of evidence), with stealing a woman’s wallet and running up some purchases, so she understands that the accusation will never be fully expunged in the minds of many, whatever the outcome of any trial.

This is a fine working plot for all kinds of reasons and avenues: the reactions and withdrawal of friends and lovers (Bush handles this with intelligence and conviction); the mining for clues and objective detail (Bush is exhaustive in the book’s best scenes, the middle-section questioning in Addis Ababa); and the acceptance or difficulty that one will never know the full details (Bush explores this from different angles, and though it ties in well with the Sara-David sub-plot, the grim persistence of the psychological reorientation overwhelms other possible moods and viewpoints).

It’s on this latter tendency, the main theme obsession, that the novel falters. Like her novel Claire’s Head, Bush is excellent at getting inside the ... er, head of the protagonist. But, though that metaphor is somewhat different in Accusation (the different locations, the many characters, the competing viewpoints and desires), Sara still suffocates the reader by not only appearing in most every scene, but by being every scene’s overwhelming conscience. A counter argument would consider that getting into others’ heads could have destroyed the factual mystery (Raymond – did he or didn’t he?), but the Canadian characters also in the dark (friend Juliet, lover David, as well as Sara’s newspaper boss) could have been offered sole-viewpoint scenes, and some of the Ethiopian characters, and Australian Sem Le, could have added layers to the confusion and emotion by offering us their unfiltered thoughts. The first-person voice could have been a better way to deal with the dominant perspective.

That major complaint aside, Accusation is narratively interesting, even thrilling in some places, especially in its final two-thirds, as well as patiently wise in its assessments.

As an addendum, the missing dialogue tags sometimes hindered my reading experience. I always understood who was speaking, it’s just that I had to halt on more than one occasion, which is fine if that’s part of the intent –  William Gaddis comes to mind – but not so fine if it detracts from the narrative pace.

Alexander Kuprin's The Duel

The title gives away the inevitable climax, but Alexander Kuprin’s concern in The Duel is to hook a common Russian melodramatic trope with his own spin, in this novel the absurdity of initial event and build-up, before the set-to itself. Military life, of which Kuprin got a taste, is skewered with existentialist mockery, realism’s magnifying glass, and a lacerating Romantic irony. Reminiscent of any Dostoyevsky femme fatale, Kuprin’s Shurochka, by theatrical and duplicitous direction, adds gasoline to the fire of Romashov’s ridiculous, impetuous pride.

Unfortunately, Kuprin’s powerful narration is compromised by translator Josh Billings’ repetitive word choices and rhythmic missteps, even though he captures a good deal of Kuprin’s lively characterizations and lyrical transitions. But by far the biggest problem in this English version of The Duel stems from Melville House Publishing’s rotten care in setting the text, which is riddled with typos (at least one per page in a 306 pp outlay). Kuprin deserved much better, and I note in mild horror that the same publisher/translator duo combined for a Pushkin collection.