SOURCE: A review of A Suitable Boy, in The New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1993, pp. 3-4.

Towers is an American educator, novelist, and critic. In the following review, he asserts that A Suitable Boy addresses an important era in Indian history but is not successful as a novel.

Indian poet Vikram Seth's novel A Suitable Boy begins with a lavishly detailed set piece devoted to a Hindu wedding and, more than 1,300 pages later, ends with another. One might well see the book itself in terms of a coupling (an odd one), for Mr. Seth—known in America as the author of a well-received novel in verse, The Golden Gate—has joined an essentially tidy, Jane Austen-like main plot with an attempt to re-create the multitudinous life of post-British India on a scale unequaled since Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Apart from their predilection for vast and crowded canvases...