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

Malgudi days; not nights. There are dark moments in [the] thirty-two short stories [of Malgudi Days], but the tragic logic is usually broken by a spot of joy in the middle or a bit of puckishness at the end. Ambiguity? The term implies a muscularity of will foreign to Narayan. He does not strive for ambiguity, nor force the action in a tragic direction, nor in a sentimental direction. The salient virtue of his art in these miniature displays is his entire ease before the double faces of existence: the tragi...

[When] Naipaul visited India for the first time, he found that "Narayan's novels did not prepare me for the distress of India" [see excerpt above]…. (p. 84) Narayan's most recent book, a collection of short stories called "Malgudi Days" …, tends to illustrate [what Naipaul called a] "Hindu response to the world."… Hinduism is not infrequently bound into the substance of [Narayan's] short stories: in one, "Iswaran,�...

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…. The new stories in Malgudi Days confirm the impression that Narayan's mild and delicate craft has changed over the decades almost as little as Malgudi itself. Early in his career he found—and quickly perfected—a ...