SOURCE: "The Many Who Didn't Belong," in The New York Times Book Review, April 9, 1989, p. 3.

West is a British novelist and critic. Below, he praises Baumgartner's Bombay, calling Desai a "superb observer of the human race."

This [Baumgartner's Bombay] is a daring, colorful novel almost impossible to absorb in one reading, and rightly so because it's about imperfect knowledge. The very title, with its quasi-guidebook roll, set me wondering. Does it, like a Fodor's Beijing, flirt with completeness, or does it remind us how subjective all knowledge is and therefore how unreliable? Like Anita Desai, who has a subtle mind, we can get the best of both notions, if we make the key phrase into a title: Baumgartner's Bombay sounds at once authoritative and tentative. If, however, we gently offer Fagin's London or Heathcliff's Liverpool (he was found there, remember), the phrase implies the mellow dignities of bias...