SOURCE: "Comedies of Suffering," in The New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1994, pp. 40-1.

In this review of The Grandmother's Tale, Tharoor claims that the simple and straightforward style that gives Narayan's stories their charm also weakens the overall effect due to inadequacies of language.

"Some time in the early 30's," Graham Greene recalled, "an Indian friend of mine called Purna brought me a rather traveled and weary typescript—a novel written by a friend of his—and I let it lie on my desk for weeks unread until one rainy day." The English weather saved an Indian voice: Greene didn't know that the novel "had been rejected by half a dozen publishers and that Purna had been told by the author . . . to weight it with a stone and drop it into the Thames." Greene loved the novel, Swami and Friends, found a publisher for it in London...