How Many Pages Are Too Many?

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie, was a difficult book for me. My problem was not the exotic locale or unfamiliar names but the kind of story-telling employed.

If I cannot help comparing Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, that’s only in part because both novels are set in India and focus on the time of the country’s independence. Other similarities lie in the novels’ daunting number of pages and a stunning number of characters and settings. In the end, however (and “in the end” here can be taken literally as well as figuratively), although Rushdie’s novel was less than half as long as Seth’s, with Midnight’s Children I kept looking to see how far along I was in the book—not halfway yet! now at the halfway mark! still, how slowly it goes!—and over and over again I set it down and picked up something less demanding for the remainder of the evening, returning to Rushdie the next morning with a sigh and a sense of determination.

In other words, this reading experience was completely different from my happy immersion in A Suitable Boy, a book that captured me on the first page and held me in its steady thrall, although it took me nearly a month to get through its 1400 or so pages. I’ll go so far as to say the length was essential to the spell it cast, because I lived in that book for the time I was reading it.

The truth (about me) is that in film, on the stage, and in the pages of fiction, I gravitate towards the various forms of realism. Material may be romantic, comedic, serious, or tragic, as long as its fictional world is coherent with reality as I know it. By the same token, the further the story moves away from a plausible (if new-to-me) reality, the higher my resistance, which I think is why most works of science fiction and fantasy fail to hold my attention. I tried and tried, for instance, to read The Hobbit, for my son’s sake (at a certain age, it was his favorite book), but while my eyes went dutifully over the book’s lines of type, my mind kept wandering. I never did get very far with it. Station Eleven, on the other hand—yeah, I could see that happening.

The way I see it, at least in Midnight’s Children (I confess to never having tried The Satanic Verses), Rushie is not a modern realistic novelist at all but a fabulist. In addition, he has quite a bit of the early teen bad-boy, Almodovár-like scatalogist in his sensibility, and for me a little of that goes a long way. All of which is to explain why it was that I did not really “get into” Midnight’s Children, a 533-page book in Penguin paperback, until I’d read over 300 pages.

But I did, finally, enter into the fable, falling in with the narrator’s pretense that his own life and its events, from his birth in the same moment as that of India’s independence, were tied to Indian politics and, in fact, brought about the events that befell the country, its leaders, and everyone whose life he touched, which was, of course, everyone! Yes, it’s a lot to swallow! Now imagine (if you haven’t read the book) swallowing not only that basic premise but a world-flood of details large and small, reminders and repetitions, revelations of what has not yet been and will not for sometimes many pages ultimately be revealed (in its own good time and in all its detail), and perhaps you begin to see the challenge a reader is given to get through this book.

I’m glad that I read Midnight’s Children, and I really enjoyed the last 150 pages. Things went better for me then because I at last stopped struggling against where the author was trying to take me.

I’ve always thought it was unfair to criticize an author for not writing a different book than the one he or she wrote. The question to be asked, rather, in this case of Rushdie, is whether or not he succeeded in the task he set himself, and as I closed the book on the last page I thought that he had.

In a way, I thought, as I was finally starting to enjoy the story, Midnight’s Children is reminiscent of Don Quixote. Rushdie, like Cervantes, asks us to believe unbelievable events, and both writers drag readers through numerous passages detailing excretory functions and unlikely mishaps to body parts. I also remember a member of our reading circle saying that she would have liked Don Quixote twice as much if it had been only half as long.

Would I have had a more positive impression of Midnight’s Children had it been only 300 pages long? I don’t think so. Since it took me over that many pages to enter the author’s world, I would have finished a shorter version more quickly but probably have closed the book shaking my head and dismissing the work as sophomoric.

N.B. What I have written today is not a book review! It is not a critical analysis! You might call it a literary confession. But most of us as readers, I think, have personal limitations that affect our reading—style prejudices, genre preferences, interest or lack or interest in certain topics, etc. I’m not talking only about “comfort zones,” but that’s part of it, I guess. Whatever you want to call my resistance in this case, I feel that pushing myself to read Midnight’s Children was the right thing for me to do, and reading all the way to the last page was, for me, its own reward.

Morning Reading: Back for the Last Few Chapters

“Do you have time to read?” one of the first people in the bookstore door asked me this morning? Not so much here at work, I told her, but I get up early. This morning I read between 7 and 8 a.m., but I’m often up by 5 or 6 a.m. (more time to read) or occasionally up at 3 a.m. to read a while before falling back to sleep for the rest of the night.

(How could I sell books if I didn’t read them? When I told my sister once that I felt guilty about reading, she sternly told me to buck up: “It’s part of your job!” There’s another question behind that one, however: Why would I want to sell books if I didn’t read? For the challenge alone?)

Thursday was a surprisingly busy bookstore day, with annual visitors from Chicago, part-time residents from Pennsylvania, old Leland neighbors, and others who have become dear friends over the years. There were first-time visitors, too, as is often the case in summer. So when I woke in the middle of the night and thought about getting up to read on the porch, I managed to go back to sleep instead and not get up until the sun was up, too,

and that’s when I finished the final gripping chapters of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo.

The undercity in the book's subtitle is a slum called Annawadi, a makeshift settlement cheek-by-jowl with the official city’s modern airport and high-rise motels. Annawadi residents live in shacks built of whatever materials they can scrape together, and they make their lives pretty much the same way they build their homes, children sorting through garbage for recyclable materials they can sell to buy food for their families. Around the airport a tall fence plastered with advertising keeps the poor at a distance and hides them from international travelers, one floor covering advertised promising to remain BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER ... FOREVER ... FOREVER ....

Katherine Boo spent three and a half years, with three different interpreters, interviewing residents of Annawadi for this book, determined to learn how ordinary low-income people, especially children, were navigating “the age of global markets.” Over and over, she found them improvising and adapting.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a nonfiction book, extensively researched, that reads like the most gripping of novels. We come to feel we know various characters intimately and share their struggles and defeats, hopes and dreams. Katherine Boo in her “Author’s Note” at the book’s conclusion writes:

Just as the story of Annawadi is not representative of a country as large and diverse as India, it is not a neat encapsulation of the state of poverty and opportunity in the twenty-first-century world. Still, in Annawadi, I was struck by commonalities with other poor communities in which I’ve spent time.

In the age of globalization—an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age—hope is not a fiction.

Much else that reads like fiction in this book is not, for example, the boy Abdul’s musings about water and ice.

Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He himself was probably little different, constitutionally, from the cynical, corrupt people around him.... If he had to sort all humanity [as he sorted garbage] by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from—and in his view, better than—what it was made of.  

He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice.

Abdul is a real person, and the image of ice was his. He wanted to have ideals and to believe in justice, despite his experiences with corrupt police and judges and hurried, overworked courts. And Abdul is only one of the real human beings you will meet and come to know in this unforgettable story.

“Would it make a good choice for a book club?” I was asked by the same woman who asked if I have time in my life to read. Definitely. Without a doubt. It is part of our real world of today, presented to us in human terms, in the lives of individuals with real names. Not surprisingly, it received for its Pulitzer-winning author a National Book Award for the year 2012.

Paper, $16

[The flowers in today's post, brought by friends Ed and Don, came from the U-Pick gardens in Omena, between Peshawbestown and Northport.]

Guest Blog: Bruce Reads Salman Rushdie

Today's guest blogger--surprise, Bruce!--is Bruce Balas of Omena, the bookstore angel (disguised as volunteer) for lo, these many years. When Bruce decided to stay home on Monday and continue his reading of Midnight’s Children, I asked him how it was going, and since he gave me permission to quote him, I decided his detailed reply would be my new blog post.

Part of the problem is that Rushdie is erratic in his story telling and wanders all over before he gets to the main thread of the story. For instance, he will say that in this chapter he is going to tell about so and so, but before he does this, he has to tell about how his mother got the flu and as a result had to move in with her uncle-in-law for three months and found romance but was caught in the act and chased out of the house by her angry husband, and so the main character was without a mother for three months, and the resulting loss of his mother’s love has affected his personality in such a way as to alter his reaction to the sequence of events highlighted in this chapter substantially enough to require a full explanation and so on and so on--blah, blah, blah.

I have figured out how to skip over those bits without it affecting the main thread of the story. To look at the book at first and see 500 pages of his ramblings is rather daunting. On the other hand, his has an interesting writing style, and the parts about the history of India are good, so I have chugged on and now, having read over 300 pages, am getting into it. Tell whoever is also reading Rushdie [I told him someone I talked to recently is struggling with The Satanic Verses] that it took me over 200 pages to figure him out, but it becomes worth it. Besides, think what an attention-getter it will be at your next cocktail party when you drop into the conversation that you’re reading Rushdie!

What do we think? Should Bruce be assigned to read Proust over the winter?

My Month in India Was Not Long Enough

When I say that A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, is like a 1349-page soap opera, I mean nothing derogatory by the comparison. As high school freshmen on half-day schedules (due to what adults called “overcrowding” but what to me just seemed what high school was, since I’d never known it any other way), my best friend and I were able to keep up with most of the television soaps of our day. She followed the morning programs while I was at school, and I went home to the afternoon shows when it was her turn to be in the classroom. We updated each other by telephone every evening. You might say we were addicted.

It was fascinating, this peering into the inner recesses of people’s lives! Characters in long-running soaps (many of the shows we watched had begun on radio) grew up over the years, often had love affairs, usually married, still sometimes had affairs, frequently divorced, eventually grew old and died. Sometimes characters died young. A show usually had at least one core couple with a solid marriage, but there were complicated extended families and any number of unusual custody arrangements, along with plenty of skeletons in all the closets. Along with love and family, there were also political ambitions and business dealings and medical emergencies. In other words, there was all the stuff of real life, in a format that allowed the characters to age like real people, if at a somewhat faster rate.

More fascinating than the characters' physical aging, however, was seeing them learn about life, draw lessons from what they learned, and change accordingly, all of these changes taking place within a complex web of family, friends, acquaintances and strangers, all of whose actions kept reaching in to tangle the strands. But stand back far enough, and a tapestry would appear. Always, the shows reflected their times. Always, they captivated their audience, who saw the characters as real people and cared what happened to them. So it is with this sprawling novel by Vikram Seth.

“You too will marry a boy I choose,” said Mrs. Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.

How much do you know of the history of India? The year is 1948, a year after independence. Ravages of the partition of Pakistan and grief over the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi are still raw wounds. But ordinary life, as it will do, goes on, despite political unrest and religious prejudice.

Mrs. Rupa Mehra, sadly a widow, loves to travel, to visit and to write letters, and with no husband to arrange a marriage for Lata, it falls on the mother to seek potential suitors from every friend and relative who can be pressed into service. The object, of course, is to find a “suitable boy,” one from a good family, educated, preferably one who speaks English as well as Hindi and who has good prospects for the future. No one expects Lata to find a husband for herself. In fact, when she begins seeing Kabir, a fellow university student from a Muslim family, the campaign to guide her into a more “suitable” romantic path is quickly stepped up. Will Lata risk outraging her family by entering into a mixed marriage, or will she allow herself to be led?

Kabir was smiling. He put his arm around her shoulder and, instead of protesting, she let it remain. It seemed to be in the right place.

The Mehra family also includes Lata’s older married brother, Arun, a socially ambitious snob, and his wife, the selfish, unfaithful Meenakshi; an older sister, Savita, and her husband, Pran; and younger brother Varun, single and apparently without direction in life. Arun believes he has made a good and happy marriage. Will he discover Meenakshi’s infidelity?

Thanks to Savita’s marriage into the Kapoor family, politics enters the picture, for Pran’s father, Mahesh Kapoor, is a member of the Congress Party and part of the government, one of those responsible for the Zamindari Abolition Act. This act would, in effect, take land from wealthy nobles and give it to those who had actually worked it for years. The Hindu-Muslim plot axis thickens when Pran’s little nephew Bhaskar, a mathematics prodigy, is introduced to Kabir’s father, a brilliant, eccentric professor of mathematics.

Mahesh Kapoor is incredulous when young Bhaskar wants to advise him on his political career. Will Mahesh Kapoor be re-elected in a new district since leaving and then rejoining the Congress Party? And if the Zamindari Act is allowed to stand, how will that affect his friendship with the Nawab Sahib, when the latter loses land that has been in the family for generations?

While the zamindars on the one hand and the framers of the act on the other, the tenantry on the one hand and the retainers of the landlords on the other, all underwent these swings of elation and depression, the judges continued to frame their judgment in secret.

Meenakshi is a member of the Chatterji family, she and her four siblings the children of Justice and Mrs. Chatterji. For the children of a judge, the young Chatterjis seem a frivolous, light-hearted bunch, given to uttering extemporaneous and utterly impertinent rhyming couplets as part of their daily conversation with one another. The most amusing sections of the novel involve the flighty Chatterjis. Will Meenakshi’s poet brother Amit succeed in winning Lata away from Kabir? Will he try? (And how much of the Calcutta-born author of this novel is to be found in the character of Amit Chatterji?)

Amit paused in his scribbling and doodling. He was attempting an inscription for Lata. Now that he had run out of inspiration he began to wonder which of his two books of poems he should send her. Or should he send her both? Perhaps the first one was not such a good idea. Besides, the second, though it too contained some love poems, had more of Calcutta in it, more of the places that reminded him of her, and might perhaps remind her of him.

The Khan family stands to lose much if the Zamindari Abolition Act holds up to constitutional challenge. Twins Imitiaz and Firoz Khan, sons of the Nawab Shahib of Baitar, are also, despite their Muslim heritage, drinking companions of young Maan Kapoor, Pran’s younger brother. Where will all this carousing lead? What dangers await the young men when they begin to visit the home of famous songstress and courtesan Saeeda Bai?

A third suitor for Lata’s hand is brought forward by an old family friend of Mrs. Rupa Mehra. Haresh Khanna is an educated, confident, hard-working, serious “self-made man.” With her mother pushing this young man so determinedly, how will Lata be able to see his merits? Will she be swayed by her brother Arun’s opinion that Haresh’s chosen field of work, the manufacture of shoes, with its “taint of leather,” is beneath her?

Haresh noticed that Lata was looking at his co-respondent shoes with what appeared almost to be distaste. But the moment he looked at her, she turned away a bit guiltily towards his small bookshelf with its maroon-bound set of Hardy novels. Haresh felt a little downcast; he had thought a great deal about what to wear.

A Suitable Boy is not told from a British imperial point of view. British influence is still strong in this period, but that rule is over. One British couple appears briefly, but the other characters are all Indians. They are Hindu and Muslim, men and women, young and old, traditional and modern, rich and poor. There are women in strict purdah and university women, men cultivating muddy fields and men in the highest levels of government. Every character, down to the youngest child, is a unique individual, however, not a mere “representative” of a group. This is India from the inside. Intimate family scenes are juxtaposed with crowds in the streets celebrating religious holidays, the holiday scenes full of color and nail-biting drama. The same is true of the political campaigning and the tension building toward the General Election of 1952, the largest popular election the world had seen to date. Conflicts abound—religious, political, familial, personal—and it is all connected.

I have focused on Lata because her mother’s search to find her a husband frames the novel from beginning to end and because there is so much in this story that doing justice to all the characters—well, from the author’s point of view it required 1,349 pages, and there isn’t a single page I would edit out. Maan, his love for Saeeda Bai, his friendship with Firoz and his Urdu lessons with Rasheed—these could be a novel all on their own, but that would mean giving up the farther-reaching connections, and there isn’t a character who doesn’t add to the story.

And Rasheed? Censorious, pitiable, worn out, torn between family shame and family pride, forced to choose between loyalty and justice, between trust and pity, what must he have gone through? Was he too not a victim of the tragedy of the countryside, of the country itself?

Does that sound as if the novel ends tragically? Never fear. There are gains as well as losses, births to counterbalance deaths.

I realize that a recommendation for a novel of this length is not going to find many takers. Anyway, I’m not selling the book. A friend loaned me the copy I read, and our local librarian said the library copy finally fell apart (publishers take note: auch a big book should really be bound in two volumes), but if ever you run across A Suitable Boy, pick it up and read a few pages. You will be hooked. And, having come to know the people in this book, you will think of India in a whole new light.

(Marigolds play a role in all the Hindu festivities. These were photographed at Northport Nursery on Mill Street.)