Vikram Seth's novel in verse, The Golden Gate (1986), won wide acclaim. Its verse is sometimes playful and sometimes exquisite, and its narrative is involving, often funny, and sometimes profoundly touching. The long narrative poem had been making a resurgence after long years of dormancy, but with Seth's work it seemed to have regained not only respect but popularity: The Golden Gate drew not just the attention of the New York Times and the New Republic but also of People magazine and the Book-of-the-Month Club. And it attracted the intense devotion of many readers, who read passages aloud to whoever would listen. What made the book all the more surprising was the range of cultures encompassed: a novel in English about young professionals and computer programmers in San Francisco, cast in the fourteen-line stanza form of Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1833), and written by an Indian educated at Oxford, who...