SOURCE: "India—All of It," in Commonweal, Vol. CXX, No. 10, May 21, 1993, pp. 25-6.

In the following review of A Suitable Boy, Worth laments that Seth's concern with moderation and fairness in his portrayal of India weakens the novel's story and leaves the reader longing for more action and a faster pace.

Vikram Seth has become something of a literary hero in recent months, both in his native India and in England. Newspapers have touted the million-pound advance he received for his monumental novel, set in early 1950s' India, and his publishers have trumpeted comparisons with Dickens, George Eliot, and Tolstoy. Seth is one of several brilliant and increasingly visible young Indian writers, and his aspirations match the recent trend (espoused by Tom Wolfe, among others) toward lengthy and ambitious "social" novels in the model of the nineteenth-century masters. Seth appears, in other words, to be riding a wave...