Arun is not sentimental about the cruelty of his upbringing and is glad he escaped it; yet, unlike Aseem and Virendra, he is never quite at home in this new world of ruthless, opportunistic self-invention. He becomes, of all non-lucrative pursuits, a literary translator. While his friends fly around the world throwing parties in the Hamptons, he lives a secluded and solitary life, a life crucially devoid of the cartoonish traits of masculinity that still obsess his peers. Virendra, who is a graduate, is drawn to the world of high finance in a way that ends up breaking the law. Aseem is a more quirky character – a writer, although his eventual fame is more of a literary horde: magazine editor, festival organizer, cultural expert, talking head. He enjoys all the celebrity benefits and chides Arun (who now lives with his mother) for not sharing his own student enthusiasm for fruitful casual sex.
What Arun finds unexpected instead is love; it’s not the promise of many women, but the seduction of one that draws him late into the decadent western world of privilege, of which Aseem is a recognized master of ceremonies. “Looking back,” Arun says, “I understand that I should have recognized Aseem’s fear of boredom, his tremendous need for stimulants, the desire to be constantly in love, especially with youth and novelty. I should have recognized, in his chosen pose as an erotic prince, an appalling fear of worthlessness.”
In the background of these three partners’ struggle to find out what kind of men they are, India itself is bursting under the weight of its false promises, giving way to a deep disorientation and resentment that leads to the election of the populist strongman Modi and to the normalization of violent bigotry. “Ignorant of lifestyles elsewhere,” Arun notes of his compatriots, “they had long been resilient amid their relative poverty. The aspirants now harbored an extravagant hope of inclusion in an apparently prosperous world. The main result was that they lost the immunity.” to the soul-crushing humiliation that the remoteness had guaranteed them.” What’s more, those like Aseem who realized their once-impossible dream of joining the Indian elite now find themselves in Modi’s India, targets not of admiration but of anger. Arun again, at an ironically inopportune moment: “Perhaps they were young men like my driver so frantic in their appetites because they knew to their bones that, outside of their ancestral professions and small businesses, they’d been educated for nothing.”
Mishra makes some formal choices that sometimes keep the action of the novel somewhat aloof. The conceit is that a somewhat unsatisfactory book has already been written using Arun and his two friends as cautionary tales about New India, and Arun is now correcting the record in a book of his own; his narration in the first person addresses the author of that first book in the second person, sort of a box around a box. Aseem rarely just says something, for example without Arun saying ‘I remember a time Aseem said’ or such a phrase preceding it. The effect can be emotionally dampening; the idea that the novel is about a conflict of interpretations tends to prioritize storytelling over showing. However, this all changes in the final chapters, when Arun finally gets around to telling his own spiritual rise and fall directly; there is a transparency, an absence of mediation, to storytelling that lends these chapters a remarkable urgency, even when what is being told is not action but thought.
