A Suitable Boy

This afternoon I finished reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth.  It is lonnnnnnng.  When I was looking for an image of the cover, I read on Wikipedia that it is one of the longest, single volume English novels ever written (comes in at 6th longest).  It ranks up there with Atlas Shrugged and the ever great and popular Varney the Vampire (?).  It is 1349 pages, and they aren't small pages either.  I started reading it back in October, but I had to put it down to move and have Christmas and put together my house.  I did want to finish and I did.  Phew! 

I picked up this book as part of my BBC list reading, and I am glad.  Although I thought Seth could have been a bit less wordy (591,552 words total), I enjoyed it.  This book is set in a fictional Indian town shortly after India has gained independence.  It revolves around four families who are interconnected either by marriage or friendship, and the search for a suitable boy to be the spouse of a nineteen year old university student named Lata.  During the unfolding of the story, Lata has three suitors: Kabir, an unsuitable boy because he is Muslim and Lata is Hindi; Haresh, a shoemaker who is a friend of a friend; and Amit, the poet brother of Lata's sister-in-law.  While I would say this is a love story, it is also the story of the political situation in India.  I learned all about Indian politics, land reform, differences in castes, and the struggle India faced in the early days of its independence.  Seth does an excellent job of character development and I felt like I really knew the people in the story by the end of the book.  I think that is what kept me reading when I started all those months ago, and what brought me back to finish.  I wanted to know how my "friends" were doing, how things resolved themselves in their lives.  And in book 17 (of 19), things take a decided turn for the worst (or so it seems), making it difficult for me to put the book down and do other things.  Fortunately, I have been biking for an hour in the mornings on the bike trainer, and I get to read while I pedal, so I was able to finish without ignoring my children too much.

Speaking of length, I wanted to include a passage from the book that I found particularly funny.  Amit, the poet suitor, is writing a novel.  He is asked to come and speak and give a reading at the university's literary club, and following his reading, there is a question and answer period.  This exchange takes place during the Q&A.  

     'Do you believe in the virtue of compression?' asked a determined academic lady.
     'Well, yes,' said Amit warily.  The lady was rather fat.  So funny!     'Why, then, is it rumored that your forthcoming novel--to be set, I understand, in Bengal--is to be so long?  More than a thousand pages!' she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.
     'Oh, I don't know how it grew to be so long,' said Amit.  'I'm very undisciplined.  Bit I too hate long books: the better, the worse.  If they're bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes.  But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals,and making enemies out of friends.  I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.'
     'How about Proust?' asked a distracted-looking lady, who had begun knitting the moment the poems stopped.
     Amit was surprised that anyone read Proust in Brahmpur.  He had begun to feel rather happy, as if he had breathed in too much oxygen.
     'I'm sure I'd love Proust,' he replied, 'if my mind was more like the Sundarbans: meandering, all-absorptive, endlessly, er, sub-reticulated.  But as it is, Proust makes me weep, weep, weep with boredom.  Weep,' he added.  He paused and sighed.  'Weep, weep, weep,' he continued emphatically.  'I weep when I read Proust, and I read very little of him.'

All this, especially the part about long books, came on page 1254.  That's right.  1254.  For the record, I have neither scowled nor growled, and I don't think I made any enemies reading this book.  A Suitable Girl, the sequel to A Suitable Boy comes out in 2013.  As A Suitable Boy was first published in 1994 and it will be twenty years to the second, I imagine the sequel will be longish too.