SOURCE: "A Chekhovian Comedy," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 93, No. 3, Summer, 1985, pp. lx-lxii.

In the review below, King offers a favorable assessment of In Custody, stating that "Desai delights us by transforming the expected into the surprising."

Anita Desai's latest novel [In Custody] explores R. K. Narayan's comic territory of well-meaning, bumbling incompetent people made more absurd when offered possibilities of change, achievement, and fame. But it is unlike a Narayan novel in that the disruption of a timeless passive India by the modern world does not conclude with humility and the acceptance of karma or fate: In Custody shows the improbability of returning to the womb of ambitionless resignation. Desai's comedy is sharper, tougher, more farcical, and less comforting than Narayan's quiet good-natured tolerance of incongruities and paradox. Instead of the intrusion's destroying itself, leaving life to go on as previously, Desai's characters remain haunted by ambitions...