For a long time it has seemed that novels from India write their own blurbs: poised, witty, delicate, sparkling.

What this fiction has been missing is a different kind of ambition, something just a little coarse, a hunger to swallow India whole and spit it out. It needed a touch of Saul Bellow's Augie March brashness, Bombay rather than Chicago born and going at things in its own special Bombay way. Now, in "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie has realized that ambition. (p. 1)

As a growing-up novel with allegorical dimensions, it will remind readers of "Augie March" and maybe of Gunter Grass's "The Tin Drum," Laurence Sterne's "Tristam Shandy," and Céline's "Death on the Installment Plan" as well as the less portentous portions of V. S. Naipaul. But it would be a disservice to Salman Rushdie's very original genius to dwell on literary analogues and ancestors. This is...