SOURCE: 'The Old Country," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXIX, No. 5, April 1, 1982, pp. 21-2.

In the following review of Malgudi Days, Towers asserts that Narayan's writing style is as traditional and unchanged as the culture of rural India, and examines several passages that support that belief

While changes on the macrocosmic scale in India have been tumultuous since R. K. Narayan's first novel, Swami and Friends, appeared in 1935, the imaginary South Indian town of Malgudi—the microcosm of his fiction—has undergone little transformation. To be sure, it is more crowded. The population continues to increase at an alarming rate, and advocates of birth control and vasectomy have appeared on the scene, their presence an affront to the old Hindu notions of fertility, sex, and decency. The British have gone; Coronation Park (just whose coronation is no longer remembered) has become Hamara Hindustan Park and...