SOURCE: "Vikram Seth," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 240, No. 19, May 10, 1993, pp. 46-7.

In the following essay based on an interview with Seth, Field and Seth discuss his literary career and the writing and publishing of A Suitable Boy.

Vikram Seth ("Seth" is pronounced to rhyme with "fate") has always set records. His first prose book, From Heaven Lake, was about walking through Tibet, and it set a record as the only book in 11 years which Chatto & Windus had found in the slush pile and published. (In 1983 it went on to win Britain's most prestigious travel-writing award, the Thomas Cook Prize.) Seth's much-celebrated first novel, The Golden Gate, was written in verse. And his second novel, A Suitable Boy, coming this month from Harper-Collins, is the longest single-volume work of English fiction since Samuel Richardson's Clarissa was published in 1747.

But Seth is also one of those rare men who is...