SOURCE: "India Day by Day," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4694, March 19, 1993, p. 20.

Iyer is an English journalist and travel writer. In the following review, he contends that parts of A Suitable Boy are more satisfying than the whole and that the novel would have been stronger if it had been shorter.

In the house of English letters, Indian writers have often admitted us to the kitchen, with its hot spices, odd condiments and strange terms; and to the bedroom, not only for its obvious seductions, but also for the wild dream-flights entertained there. The event-infused city, the superstitious village, the polymorphous forms of Indian films are all by now familiar parts of the Indian scenery. But what Vikram Seth has tried to do, in his quietly monumental new novel, is to usher India into the drawing-room, to make it seem as everyday and close to us as...