Ratcheting down the suspense
The reading person's crimes are not many outside of mutilating or damaging books and not returning them to their owners. Well, there is also an act, a sin rather than a crime, which I used to consider thoroughly dissolute but which now, hardened by the rigors of professional reading, I commit regularly. I refer to looking ahead to see how a novel ends. Morality, self-discipline, and expediency aside, knowing the end can ruin a novel, but just as often, I have found, it improves matters. It gives light to the space that lies between beginning and end by allowing one to concentrate properly, free from anxiety about whether there will be nasty surprises, triumphant resolutions, or merely exhausted wrap-ups and peterings-out. And, indeed, some writers know this and simply let us know from the start how things will end.
This is the case with Aravind Adiga's arresting and unlikely black comedy, "The White Tiger" (Free Press, $24), a first novel set in what is known, for better or worse, as the New India. The hero, if that is the word, is Balram Halwai, a.k.a. the White Tiger. He has taken it upon himself to write a series of letters to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, who is planning a visit to India with an eye to investigating the entrepreneurial vigor that has made the country such an economic powerhouse. "Our nation," Balram tells him, "though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs." Balram, once a lowly servant, is now a successful entrepreneur and pleased to explain not only his origins, but how he funded his "start-up," as he loves to call it: He murdered his master and stole 700,000 rupees. This is known to us by page 36, and the 230 pages that follow and fill in the years that turned a destitute village boy into a rich man are all the more engrossing because of it. In fact, if this crime - or act of social entrepreneurship, as Balram styles it - had not been revealed early on, even before we have properly met the master in question, I would have been forced at some point in this tale of injustice, high-handedness, and humiliation to look ahead in case there was to be no recompense. Had there not been, I might well have abandoned the novel, as I read for pleasure and not to have my nose rubbed in social and economic reality.
Having settled this matter, however, Balram goes on, disconcertingly, to show that actually, as masters go, his - Mr. Ashok - was one of the better ones. This moves us into fraught territory: out of the simple land of just deserts and gratifying retribution, into the profoundly corrupt and corrupting nature of what we might call the globalized world. Mr. Ashok, his sensibilities flabbed up by time spent in America, defends Balram from the unkindness of others and shows occasional compassion for his lot. We begin to wonder if we are quite so happy he's doomed. Soon enough, however, we notice what a luxury Mr. Ashok's conscience is, how he exercises it when it costs him nothing. His life of ease is dependent on his family, a line of brutal, exploitative landlords who have greatly increased their power and wealth by high-stakes bribes in the national political arena. Mr. Ashok's father and brothers are forthrightly ruthless, but Mr. Ashok is encumbered by thinking of himself as a nice guy. It's a vexatious problem for all liberals with big money - and for which the word "hypocrisy" doesn't seem quite unsavory enough.
Like all who profit from it, Mr. Ashok takes Balram's show of servility at face value. No surprise there, of course, but what is more to the point and the great subject of this very fine, caustically funny novel is the struggle that Balram himself has with this trait. "The desire to be a servant," he explains to Wen Jiabao, "had been bred into me: hammered into my skull, nail after nail, and poured into my blood, the way sewage and industrial poison are poured into Mother Ganga." He paints a picture of oppression - at the hands of his village family, who destroyed his parents, pulled him from school, demanded his wages, and ordered him to marry in hopes of shaking down the bride's family; at the hands of the functionaries who use every civil position for personal gain; and at those of his bosses, whose tyranny is monumental and crushing even when it is, as with Mr. Ashok, the tyranny of a big baby. In the end, this is no more a novel whose subject is social and economic injustice than the subject of "Crime and Punishment" is urban violence. It is the story of a man's soul, and a pretty scary (and defiantly funny) one it is too.
Juliet Nicolson's "The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm" (Grove, paperback, $15) wouldn't be half so fascinating if we didn't know that the way of life it describes and, indeed, many of the lives themselves were going to end in tragedy. The book, whose author is a granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, is something like a great gossip column just barely held together by acrobatic transitions, but obliviousness to the war looming ahead and, indeed, to the long-term significance of the labor unrest that marked the summer lends poignancy to these lives. In addition to describing the carryings-on of the better sort, which is to say, the spoiled, self-absorbed people of privilege, Nicolson shows us the condition of the working classes and gives what I call rousing accounts of the various industrial and transportation strikes that shifted them to center stage.
It was the hottest summer in memory in England, reaching an unimaginable 100 degrees Fahrenheit in August (to the great satisfaction of the African animals in the London Zoo). It also saw the coronation of George V and his queen, Mary, who, we are told, regretted she had never in her life climbed over a fence. It was the heyday of Madame Blavatsky and Vaslav Nijinsky. The Mona Lisa was stolen, and women wore gowns called such things as "When passion's thrall is o'er" and "The sighing sounds of lips unsatisfied." It is particulars such as these, as well as generous dollops of domestic detail, that make this a most entertaining book and the perfect summer read.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
