A Suitable Boy
by Vikram Seth
Harper Perennial Modern Classics, Reissued October 2005
Seth was, pre-Boy, perhaps best known for his novel Golden Gates, written entirely in sonnets. A Suitable Boy is quite different, though suffused with poetry, both in the rhymes one family spontaneously generates at the slightest provocation, and in the rhythm and elegance of Seth’s prose. However, this book is most like a Victorian novel in genre. It is HUGE. It has lots of pages. It has nearly as many characters and subplots, complications, major and minor life devastations, and an ending both as final and as inconclusive as anything George Eliot ever produced.
It is set in 1950’s India around the time of Partition. This is not a historical moment that I’m especially familiar with, and I think a bit of prior knowledge would have helped my comprehension of the larger story. The ostensible main plot, however, is fairly universal: Lata, the young heroine, has a devoted mother who is busily trying to marry her off to a suitable boy. Unfortunately, Lata meets and instantly falls in love with an extremely unsuitable boy—for starters, he’s Muslim and she’s Hindu. Enter a couple of other suitors AND everybody’s families AND dashes of religion and politics and other romances of the mostly unsuitable variety, and you’ve got a really long novel. Also a very good one.
Lata is a woman at the cusp of many things, the modern era being but one of them. So, for her, the choice of husband (inasmuch as it is her choice, which brings up another set of issues in the novel) carries a vast weight of symbolism. Will she choose the vulgar but traditional and up-and-coming shoe salesman her mother promotes? Or maintain a balance between tradition and individualism by marrying the witty and educated Hindu poet whom her mother doesn’t like but cannot forbid? Or will she go the truly modern route and marry her Muslim student for love? And by the end, which does the reader, seduced into the mindset(s) of the book’s world, want her to choose, and why?
If you do read this one, please do let me know your thoughts on it. Especially on the ending. You can email me at thelonglets@hotmail.com.
--Reviewed by Jordana who holds and juggles two MAs, two children (one unborn), one biohusband, and many good ideas. Jordana teaches English at a high school in coastal Virginia. See her blogsite carpematrem.wordpress.com.
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