God of Small Things

Sometimes in reading I forget what it is to be enlivened by a book, to experience absorption so complete that fiction converges on truth. Seduced by the rigors of realism, lulled into complacency by a dominant, nattily clever, voice of popular writers today, I sometimes forget why I like reading. I pick up a book, gulp! I go way into the story’s belly, pft! and I’m expelled with the same soft landing, inevitableness. The same flatulent effect, noxious wonder, of turning the last page, of consumption. What’s the point after awhile? I’ve read so many books like this lately – good, good, hm, haw…I forget that the point is story. And by story, I mean communication, meaning that writing is about a reader, not just a foray into familiar neuroses, not the same old magic tricks, not a proving ground. Really great books create their own language, John Updike said, in praise of The God of Small Things. And I finally read the book and I see what he means.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a wonder. What a truly successful book – winner of the Booker Prize, numerous other accolades, Book Club recommendations, Oprah. Success at that level sometimes makes a book Teflon, unapproachable. It was a mistake. Lost time. What a complex, finely written, book – understandably a success, by that word’s most multidimensional meaning.

The story follows the lives of a pair of “two egg twins,” Esta and Rahel. In flashback, the story pieces together the events that led to a tragedy, forever splintering the twins’ lives. When the twins are young, their beautiful half-English cousin, Sophie Mol, comes to visit. She dies, unexpectedly (not a spoiler) and the way in which the family constructs the story of her death alters the twins’ lives forever. The book is set in India, on the grounds of the family estate, home also to the family’s source of income, a pickle factory. The story is a success on so many levels – its inventions in language (the opening line: May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month), its narrative pull, operatic emotional height and smaller eddies of tenderness, driven by mystery (what happened the day Sophie Mol died?). But the book’s complexity comes also from the broader issues it draws on – the unavoidable politics of the time, grown out of caste history. The story’s central tragedy is told in a feat of realism, drawing on the old lesson that complicity is unavoidable and disfiguring. And yet, the book also manages to be a feat of magical writing – we are beguiled, we remain in the thrall of Roy’s characters. The book contains a world of fictions – the stories that Esta and Rahel and their beautiful mother tell themselves as they live together. The book is triumph of fiction, impressing on the reader that stories are powerful – their construction can give life and death, condemnation or deliverance, joy.