Review: A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

At 1,500 pages, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is the longest book I’ve ever read, and possibly the longest book I ever want to read. I consumed it — or it consumed me — over two weeks of vacation. I ingested 300-page chunks on multiple plane journeys and bus rides, and piecemeal between festivities at a frenzied Indian wedding. It was never anything less than utterly compelling and all-consuming, but it truly sung during those uninterrupted hours of ceaseless reading; when the plot points, characters, and their innumerable strands of connective tissue truly came to the fore, alongside the luminous immensity of its scale and scope.

Seth luxuriates in this tale of Mrs. Rupa Mehra’s attempt to find her daughter, Lata, a suitable boy to marry, which is the overriding centrepiece of a novel that strives (and succeeds) to be much more than a love story. Set primarily in Brahmpur, A Suitable Boy spotlights four well-off families — particularly their younger members — in the tumultuous time of newly independent India, which is striving to find its identity in a post-English world. The novel marries familial and political drama, flavoured with plenty of local colour, and despite its enormity, never feels overstuffed. It’s a literary colossus, a brilliant book, that didn’t quite hit the same high notes for me as Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, but is nonetheless a novel I’ll remember reading for the rest of my life.