The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things
By Arundhati Roy

As the world sinks into pathology, as my kids drift further from me, as I creak towards 53 years—pot-bellied, lonely, strange, starved for affection, grieving lost family life, I ask, Why read novels?

I read The God of all Small Things because, according to a Korean woman who seemed intelligent and who used it to teach her CUNY students, it is a Good Book.

I have developed an allergy to Good Books.

Roy is an annoyingly precious writer. Her words scream, I Am A Writer. I keep my chin high as I describe tragic events with bitter irony, events which are, I assure you, as much products of history as of small-minded prejudice.

A nutshell: on a visit to her Indian father, several months after her beloved step-father dies in a car accident in England, Sophie Mol drowns, though Roy doesn’t explain how until the last 20 pages. To create the book’s magical, tragic effect, Rahel, the adult narrator, switches from the days leading up to the tragedy to her visit many years later.

Rahel is Sophie Mol’s cousin. She and her twin brother Estha are so close they can read each other’s minds. Ammu, their single mother, falls for Velutha, an untouchable. After their affair is discovered she is locked in her room by an enraged brother. Mourning her lost love affair, she accuses the twins of ruining her life. Hurt, they attempt to run away with their visiting cousin, crossing the river in a leaky boat that sinks and drowns Sophie Mol. The Paravan, a good-hearted, free-thinker with a genius for fixing things is beaten to death for his supposed transgression. Ammu leaves home, eventually dying alone as a prostitute. Rahel moves to America, to a lousy marriage and divorce, Estha is sent to live with relatives. He grows up mute. The story is a Faulknerian metaphor for India’s senseless violence and ethnic slaughter.
In other words, this is a Big Meaningful Novel.

But unlike Faulkner Roy’s carefully-wrought, self-conscious prose begins to bug the shit out of me. Page after gothic page, I struggled to pay attention, to follow the dry wit, the show-offy sentences, the Booker Prize strutting syntax, feeling increasingly like a did the eleven times I tried to read Ulysses. Stupid.

It is not a bad book—it has a big heart and a story with truths galore—but it tries too hard to trumpet it’s importance, like a beautiful woman with too much makeup.

And the story-seen-through-the-eyes-of-babes artifice grows tiresome, as if the child’s innocent voice, and the grown-up child’s not-so-innocent memories are supposed to deepen the tragedy. They don’t. The tragedy speaks for itself.

A second annoyance was Estha, Rahel’s brother rendered mute by childhood trauma. I am really tired of characters-rendered-mute (or schizophrenic, etc.)-by childhood trauma. Doesn’t anyone go nuts for no reason anymore? Because, say, the brain chemical are fucked up? And why doesn’t someone write a crazy character that is immensely unpleasant, the way many real crazy people are? Someone we’d really rather not know better? Why do we have to go through the Maya Angelou deceit again? (Angelou, in one of her books, claims that after being raped, she didn’t talk for two years—funny how in real life trauma never seems to lead to muteness; it usually leads to other, much less pretty behaviors—meth addiction, sleeping around, armed-robbery, shitty grades—never has any child I’ve known gone all delicate like Estha and wandered gracefully and mutely through town and market till his sister feels the need to fuck him. (Yes, they have sex, though the narrator claims it’s not lust, but “shared grief”).

Another thing: can ugly chick write? Are there any non-white Booker-prize winners who are not frighteningly beautiful? Are drop-dead good ethnic looks a prerequisite for winning literary prizes? Judging from photos of Roy and Zadie Smith, no.  Just wondering.