SOURCE: "The Prophet in the Tree," in The New York Times, Vol. 147, July 12, 1998, p. E45.

[In the following review of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Jaffrey praises Desai's "huge imagination," and declares the author's work "a dizzying Hindi film of a novel."]

A voice, and a huge imagination, leap from the pages of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, a dizzying Hindi film of a novel by the 27-year-old Kiran Desai, daughter of the fiction writer Anita Desai. Like mother, like daughter—which is not to say that Kiran Desai hasn't charted a territory of her own, as indebted to Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf as to Salman Rushdie or her mother.

The novel is slow to get into but soon catapults us into a world in which a young Indian man, Sampath, has lost his mind, climbs a guava tree to escape from the world of men. and then...