The God of Small Things

I told a friend from India that I've been reading Jhumpa Lahiri and he recommended The God of Small Things, which was written about the Syrian Orthodox community in southwest India, called Kerala, where he's from. The Syrian Orthodox community traces their founding to seven original families who were converted by St. Thomas, the apostle.

What a wonderful recommendation! The God of Small Things is Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize winning first book. It couldn't be more different from Lahiri's writing, which is spare and plain. Roy writes in the tradition of magical realism. Her writing is fantastical and playful--she writes from the perspective of a child who is learning English as a second language, playing with words and capitalization from a child's perspective. This results in extremely poetic, Gerard Manly Hopkins-esque writing. For instance:

"Past floating yellow limes in brine that needed prodding from time to time (or else islands of black fungus formed like frilled mushrooms in a clear soup)."

Honestly, I was entirely unfamiliar with magical realism outside of its Latin American incarnation (moving up to the U.S. in books like Bless Me, Ultima). The God of Small Things is a lot like One Hundred Years of Solitude--both describe multiple generations of a big, important family. Both deal with incest.

The God of Small Things is about twins who have one soul--Rahel, our narrator, and Estha, her brother. It is about the violation of what Roy calls the laws of love: there is a sexual relationship between a touchable and an untouchable, there is a man forcing a boy into a sexual relationship, and, at the end of the novel, there is incest between the twins.

While Tocqueville announces the movement of the world from aristocracy to democracy, Roy traces, in an aristocratic society, the violent backlash of fear and anxiety against the movement toward democracy. Roy writes:

"The twins were too young to know that these were only history's henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, man's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness."

This is the theme of the book--power's fear of powerlessness. It is this fear that is unleashed in the society when an untouchable man sleeps with a touchable woman. It is this fear that is expressed by men beating their wives, which Roy writes about. It is this fear that is expressed in the capitalist fear of Marxism, which Roy also brings up.

Christianity is not, in this novel, an alternative to the caste system; rather, Roy shows how Christianity in India syncretized with the existing caste system. Interestingly, it's television that finally brings some democratic equality to the community, but it's democracy and equality in a globalized, mediocrity-inducing sense.


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