Word: novelized
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...Bombay and buy a flat for them as a reward, Meera, already four months along, aborts. Suri's description of the procedure, in a scuzzy room above a bathroom-fixtures shop, is macabre and grating, but typical of his hyper-realistic prose, which animates the best parts of the novel with its frankness. "Scabs of green paint were peeling off the wall and ceiling," and a "strong meaty odor, like that from a fatty cut of mutton boiled in a curry, emanated from the door...
...title suggests, though, the novel's intended allusion is to India's legendary past. In this case, it's the cosmic myth of Shiva, the Hindu god of annihilation. But the deity's link to Meera (and to India as she self-destructs and regenerates) is labored. If anything, Meera more closely resembles, even fantasizes about being, the goddess Parvati, Shiva's spurned consort and the mother of Ganesh, the elephant...
...Shiva is Suri's own pachyderm of a child. It's a huge and lumbering novel that took seven years to write and leaves hardly any ground unfurrowed. But Meera's growth from narcissism to selflessness is too slow, and her core epiphany - what it means to be a parent - is a cliché. Suri's cyclorama of a newborn, metropolitan India, where streets are clogged not with carts but cars, can be engrossing. Too bad a prima donna stands center stage, blocking the view...
...before we hit the offices of almost 200 congressional members, we sat through an afternoon of PowerPoint-filled workshops at the Grand Hyatt Washington hotel to learn lots of stats. These all seemed boring, so I suggested we dress the kids up like street urchins from a Dickens novel and give them dented tin cups...
...sick, cerebral thrill of ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 241 pages), a dense, fractally complex first novel by the conspicuously talented Rivka Galchen, lies in watching a shrink, one of the trusted guardians of consensus reality, drift out of his lane and into oncoming traffic. Over and over again, Leo's finely calibrated mind analyzes the available data and arrives by the most rigorously logical methods at a series of increasingly demented conclusions. Which makes you realize, queasily, how worthless those methods were in the first place...