SOURCE: "Indian Summa," in London Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 8, April 22, 1993, p. 9.

In the following review, Lanchester remarks favorably on A Suitable Boy, praising the novel as a "portrait of Indian life" that possesses remarkable structural clarity.

Forests have been slain, not only in the manufacture of A Suitable Boy, but in the production of its review coverage. An unusual amount of the publicity has been statistical, with journalists dwelling on the size of the book (1349 pages), its weight (an uncompromising 1.5 kilos), the size of the advances received ('2.6 crore rupees'), and its status as the longest one-volume novel in the English language. (Clarissa is longer and is now published in one volume, but wasn't written that way.) The Indian reviews are generally rupee-driven, and widely acclamatory; one magazine says that Seth 'has become India's answer to Pearl S. Buck and Tolstoy'. The English reviews are also rupee-driven...