Kindle. Mishra's first novel in twenty years! — and in many ways coextensive with The Romantics of 1999 and his explication of Buddhism of 2004.
Notionally Mishra uses the divergent paths of three low-born blokes who make it into the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi to explore the horrors of the New India and the changing fashions among high end cosmopolitan dynasties, some of whom share his literary aspirations. Much of it looks like hard work for risible returns.
The prose is mostly OK, leaving aside an excess of adjectives that often tip reasonable descriptions into overly-precise incorrectness. And a heavy, deadening referentialism. And the short-order repetition. And the hefty foreshadowing, the selective drip of information. The ambient context is assumed known: temporal anchors are mostly provided by real-world political events.
The main flaw is weak characterisation. The three undergo a shock-and-awe initiation at IIT. Dalit Virendra Das (the lonely computer science major to the two mechanical engineers) remains shallowly drawn as a generic, cultureless, deracinated Wall St billionaire. Aseem Thakur is marginally more real as an editor of a literary journal of some kind. He's a fan of V.S. Naipaul and an all-in predatory, hedonistic individualist who somehow still feels a duty to improve the country. The author/narrator Arun Dwivedi (with the highest entry rank of the three) retreats to literary translation in the Himalayas after not making it in the Delhi social scene. In shades of David Williamson the latter two are more influenced by an encounter with a literature professor than anything in their degree programs. Indeed Mishra completely avoids engaging with the content of the exact sciences in any form; technology is reduced to brands, finance to insider trading. (If he'd done his research he'd know that everything is securities fraud.)
But all this is just a precursor to a painfully adolescent romance between late-40s pseudo-Brahmin Arun and mid-30s dream girl, Muslim/scion/social media star-not-influencer Alia Omar who has sown her wild oats and is now in need of a serious man. The death of his mother is messier but as conveniently timed as Charlotte Haze's in Nabokov's Lolita. The male insecurities that (inevitably) bring things unstuck put me in mind of Julian Barnes's Before She Met Me. Arun's retreat to a remote Tibetan-Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas was a severe and under-explained overreaction, though I guess his usual stupefacient, fiction, was shown to be ineffective during their London bout.
Mishra wants to examine the beast as a perennial outsider, in contrast to Mohsin Hamid's How to get filthy rich in rising Asia (2013) where the inside view was shown to be more powerful. The ascetic Buddhism portrayed here is not critiqued. The Tibetan situation is sketched but not engaged with. There's nothing in the way of resolution. I wish he'd either stick to his essays and social diagnostics or move past autofiction.
Bharat Tandon. Jonathan Dee hides behind some hefty extracts. Abhrajyoti Chakraborty: "new India, old ideas" — damn straight and ouch-y. At some point the fake is itself the substance. The anxiety of the narrator may be that of an author anxious to be understood. Goodreads: reviews are generally positive, the ratings entirely dire. (krn gives it a good hard working over.) A general flaw of the commentary is that these three blokes are not mates so much as frenemies.
