Word: altered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
NEGLECTED LIVES by Stephen Alter Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 179 pages...
...book takes place in India, where Alter grew up (although he went west for his education). The protagonist, not surprisingly a young man, comes from that hybridization of Englishmen and Hindustani that Georg Orwell described so brilliantly 35 years ago. Alter's hero feels a similar sense of class and cultural instability as those Orwell less charitably referred to as half-breeds. At the start of the book he seduces a young Hindu woman, is caught and beaten to a mild pulp by her rather boorish brothers, and banished by his embarrassed family to the hinterlands. At this point...
...watching the jungle reclaim the cottages. Naturally, this, uh, bucolic setting provides time for a lot of introspection, which is what just about everybody does. All of the characters involved get their chance to spin out brief but revealing vignettes about their various problems--sexual, social, existential. Here Alter really struts his stuff; the excellent vignettes display versatility that a young novelist, by rights, should not yet have. He uses multiple perspectives of the same event has a Faulknerian ring...
...Alter is best at creating an atmosphere for the seemingly epiphanal moments in the book. The only difficulty is that these moments, when they finally occur, do not always fulfill the promise of their set-ups. For example, a fat man determines to lose a lot of weight, once and for all, and let his slothful habits fall by the wayside. The description of his decision and the absurd steps he takes are fine, but after he gets all cranked up, he simply and predictably caves in again. These trivial moments of neo-existential despair wear kind of thin. Alter...
Neglected Lives may mark the arrival of a strong new force in fiction; still, it remains to be seen whether Alter can break out of the ultimately constraining parameters of trying to write the Great Indian Novel. For the present, however, Neglected Lives is a fine first novel, and the only thing a similarly-aged writer can do is be admiringly jealous...