Havurah Shalom

Fiction/Novel, 321 pages.

The God of Small Things is equal parts a perfectly paced mystery story, family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama. Set in 1969 in Kerela, India, against a background of sexual, racial and caste conflict that seethes around it like a threatening ocean, it centers on a dysfunctional family. What is different about this novel is that it is largely told from the perspective of the children who witness and experience the events unfolding around them. Children see the details that adults have forgotten to notice and at the same time overlook and misinterpret what seems so obvious to us grownups. Through the eyes of the seven year old twins, Esta and Rachel, we see the fragilities, contradictions, pettiness, and cruelty of the adult world. It is a testament to Roy’s artistry that she so convincingly creates the inner life of her child characters. Infused with wisdom, the children’s view is never oversimplified or romanticized.

Winner of the 1997 Booker Award this brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Roy moves us backwards and forward in time in a rhythmic dance that slowly reveals the hidden heart of the story.  The non-linear plot contributes to its dream like quality, as does the writing itself.   Slipping back and forth between the boundaries of prose and poetry, the language of the God’s of Small things is lush, playful, and mesmerizing.  Roy's clarity of vision is remarkable, her voice original, her story beautifully constructed and masterfully told. That this is a debut novel is just one of many remarkable things about this extraordinary work of fiction.  No less a writer than John Updike had this to say about it:

“Roy peels away the layers of her mysteries with such delicate cunning, such a dazzling adroit shuffle of accumulating revelations that to discuss the plot would be to violate it. Like a devotionally built temple, The God of Small Things builds a massive interlocking structure of fine intensely felt details. A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.”

Discussion led by David Newman in Zoom Room Bet.