Stopping over at India via Botswana

Speaking Volumes

The formula for a rising Hollywood star used to run along these lines. First there's the hopeful actor in Phase One: "If you have the time, please give me a call. I'll be waiting by the phone."

Then there's the moderately successful role, or Phase Two: "Give me a buzz. I'm in the phone book." Then there's the big Oscar-nominated role, or Phase Three: "The party you are inquiring about has an unlisted number."

You have a similar phenomenon with a certain kind of Author of Indian Origin writing of India in the West. Phase One: "I really hope my book does well in India."

Phase Two: "There were a few bad reviews, but only from India "" everyone here loved it." Phase Three usually occurs after the author has been feted enough abroad to relax into relative honesty: "India? No, they hate me and besides, they don't count."

Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, A Temporary Matter, drew admiring reviews by and large in the West. The reviews in India were generous, laced with mild criticism where us native reviewer types sensed a gap between Lahiri's (limited) knowledge of the country and her (admirable) writing talent.

The criticism never reached the proportions of an attack, and when she received the Pulitzer Prize, most commentators in India as well as abroad agreed that it was deserved.

Lahiri wrote an anguished response attacking the cult of authenticity "" it raised a minor kerfuffle, and then all of us got on with our lives. Not so Lahiri, who seems reluctant to risk more insult.

In other words, she's in Phase Three "" she might visit. Some day do a stopover when she's off to Australia for a literary festival, kind of thing.

Her second book, The Namesake is drawing a mixed bag of reviews, including a rare rave from the formidable Michiko Kakutani, while others have been mildly critical. The first review to come out in India was a gushing thumbs-up. Perhaps if someone posts Lahiri a copy, she might even change her travel plans!

Not that the reviewing business here is above criticism. The Incredible Shrinking Review continues to puzzle me. If the average length of a novel is around 300 pages, and the average length of a review is around 600 words, you're allotting about 200 words to a hundred pages.

No one benefits "" not the author, who's sweated anything from a year to five over his heartbreaking work of staggering genius, not the reviewer, who must either turn traitor to her job and read the book cursorily, or live with the trauma of reading a book carefully only in order to post a short, blurb-length notice, not the reader, who's better off reading the publisher's catalogue.

The practice of logrolling "" getting someone to praise a book for specious, often nepotistic, reasons "" is balanced by the practice of pulling in the author's sworn enemy to review the book, to make for controversial reading that the public will lap up.

And as will be obvious to anyone who reads the books pages, standards fluctuate wildly. The same page might feature in a single week the Review Disingenuous (where the reviewer has an axe to grind but pretends impartiality); the Review Via Kunji (regurgitate the blurb and the plotline so that you need not actually read the book); or the Review Outrageous (where the reviewer has read, but not understood, the book, and will proceed to flaunt his ignorance). I'm a practitioner of the Review Overcompassionate, where one allows a fleeting sense of pity for the poor author to outweigh one's finer judgement, to the detriment of the reader and your own self-esteem.

Some practitioners do stand out, though, and Anita Roy has been in my personal Top Five for a long time. I stand doubly indebted to her for coining the term Mirror Literature to describe the kind of book that has the same appeal as egosurfing (Googling your own name) on the Net.

You read it in order to be gratified by the fact that the author has written about People Like You "" women in bad marriages and small-town Indians are at the top of this list. The problem with Mirror Literature is that it does nothing beyond hold up a glass in which you can discern a reflection.

My current panacea is provided by two detectives, one old and one new-minted. Nero Wolfe has given me unending hours of pleasure "" he provides recipes (try grilling kidneys a la Fritz some day!) alongside cheerfully improbable plots.

The new detective in my life is Mma Ramotswe, proprietor of The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, situated in Botswana and dreamed up in the wondrously fertile mind of Alexander McCall Smith, whose 50-odd previous books have included treatises on Botswana's criminal laws and a short story collection called Portuguese Irregular Verbs.

Precious Ramotswe, who is a "traditionally built woman", has a case list that involves a higher proportion of moral dilemmas than corpses. Her clients have included a woman who knows her husband has stolen a car, a beauty contest organiser who wants to be sure that his four finalists are women of integrity, and the parents of children gone missing in the bush.

She has been compared to Miss Marple, perhaps because both women practise their trade by being good listeners and good people, but Mma Ramotswe is a one-off as a Lady Detective.

The series made me realise just how much I'd missed the days when all cases weren't set in the forensic lab, when all murderers weren't psychotic serial killers, and when all detectives weren't hideously complicated personalities working out their own psychoses.

Meanwhile, I have adopted Nero Wolfe's patent system of judging the quality of books and am in deep trouble as a result. Books "marked with a thin strip of gold" (alas, silver, in my case) are Grade A. Books "marked with a piece of paper" are Grade B. Books with a dog-eared page to mark the place are Grade C. Below that is the last circle of hell, i.e Grade D.

It is disheartening, perhaps, but with a very few exceptions, I find that most of what I'm reading off the Booker long-list and off the new wave of Indian literary talent is firmly Grade C, and that's only because I'm too kind to do worse to a book than dog-ear it.

Either my standards have risen over the years, or there really isn't much wildly exciting writing out there. It needs the wisdom of a Precious Ramotswe to sort out this one.

nilroy@lycos.com