The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy published The God of Small Things in 1997, won the Booker Prize, and then did not publish another novel for twenty years. The silence is in one sense mysterious and in another sense comprehensible: The God of Small Things is a novel that fully expended its author’s accumulated literary intelligence, a book in which everything-the language, the structure, the imagery, the politics-is precisely where it needs to be, and moving from such completeness would be hard for anyone.

The novel is set in Kerala, India, in 1969 and in the early 1990s, following the Ipe family-particularly the twins Rahel and Estha-across a catastrophe whose precise contours the novel reveals slowly, moving backward and forward in time with structural deliberateness. The “rules” at the center of the story are the Love Laws, which determine “who should be loved, and how. And how much”-the caste system’s decree that certain kinds of love are impossible, and what it costs to love anyway.

Roy’s prose is the novel’s primary glory: exuberant, rhythmic, inventive, working with repetition and capitalization and compressed image in ways that owe as much to poetry as to narrative fiction. She writes about childhood’s perception of adult catastrophe-the way children register what they are not supposed to understand-with unusual precision and compassion. The relationship between the twins, their bond that is also a shared wound, gives the novel its emotional gravity.

The Booker Prize was not wrong. The God of Small Things is a masterwork-a novel that takes the formal resources of English and uses them to articulate truths about a society English colonialism helped create, and does so with a beauty that is inseparable from its anger.