Eh.

So, I'm almost halfway through The Inheritance of Loss ... I know, I'm going very, very slowly. Why did I think that being an English teacher was a good idea? The world will never know. In any case, the piles of yet-to-be-graded papers always seem to take precedence over any sort of TBR list.

I find that I tend to like books better when I can devour them in one fell swoop, allowing me to more completely lose myself in the world that the author has created. So perhaps it's the forced slow reading of the book that's not allowing me to get as wrapped up in it as I'd like. But I can't help feeling a sense of disappointment. The pacing of the book feels off to me, and I'm not very interested in any character's story line, really. I suppose I want to know what happens to Biju (the cook's son, trying desperately to make a living in the New York restaurant world), but as for the rest of them, I could take them or leave them. Sai bores me. I'd like to like Gyan, but I haven't been let into his head enough to know what he's about. The neighbors (Mrs. Sen, Lola, Noni, etc.) seem rather like caricatures.

I also take issue with the heavy-handed way Desai deals with politics here. Don't get me wrong, I love a book with some good political meatiness to it. Hell, I loved Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, and Midnight's Children, of course, and those are both chock full of politics. But Rushdie and Mistry create characters whose lives and development are inseparable from politics, so everything seems to flow from one point, and the reader never feels as though political thoughts are being forced down his throat because the arc of the political thoughts coincides in a perfect parabola with the characters' arc of motion.

Kiran Desai, as much as I hate to say it, is not Rushdie.

Her characters' lives ARE separable from the politics surrounded them, as perhaps is best exemplified by Sai and Gyan, living in a world of their own romance, oblivious to everything passing by them. Even Biju's struggles relate more to identity issues than politics, and his residence in America does not revolve around political barriers as much as personal ones. The political references feel out of place, artificial.

Perhaps my opinion will change as I delve into the second half of the novel, but Desai has yet to convince me that she's bringing something new to the table in a genre so populated with monumental works.