SOURCE: "A Silver Thimble in Her Fist," in New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1997, p. 5.

[In the following review, Truax notes that The God of Small Things is at times painful and difficult to read, but maintains that the reader is richly rewarded for finishing the novel.]

There is no single tragedy at the heart of Arundhati Roy's devastating first novel. Although The God of Small Things opens with memories of a family grieving around a drowned child's coffin, there are plenty of other intimate horrors still to come, and they compete for the reader's sympathy with the furious energy of cats in a sack. Yet the quality of Ms. Roy's narration is so extraordinary—at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple—that the reader remains enthralled all the way through to its agonizing finish.

This ambitious meditation on the decline and fall of an Indian...