The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

After reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, I needed to read something considerably less wholesome. Good news--I found it! More specifically, I found it in Aravind Adiga's Man Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger.

Now, The White Tiger comes not only with a prized pedigree--it's also got fans in some of the toughest review venues: The Times (both London and New York), WaPo, and possibly the biggest of them all, the South China Morning Post. The blurb pages proclaim this to be pretty much the best book ever. Is it?

Probably not, but it is one of the better first novels I've read. The story is one told mainly in flashback, in a series of (presumably unanswered) letters to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao from Bangalore "entrepreneur" Balram Halwai. Balram is a self-styled businessman, fluent in concepts like American outsourcing and internet marketing. But while his letters begin as a friendly offer to teach Indian entrepreneurship to the Premier so that he can spread the gospel to China, they begin to take on a much more confessional tone.

Balram delves into his rural childhood poverty, and his eventual job as a servant for a rich man's spoiled son. Held in his place by ridiculously low wages, and deprived of basics like privacy, sex, and open speech, Balram seems destined to be pitifully stuck in India's sociopolitical dregs. But he's smart enough to realize it--and smart enough to lay low while he figures out how to shift everything to his advantage. But no matter how clever he is (the rare "white tiger" among his generation of ignorant, apathetic country schoolchildren), there's not much Balram can do to overcome his servant caste and his "half-baked" education. Most of the novel's tension comes from when and how Balram will slash his way out of his rut. He announces very early on that he's a wanted criminal--but the full connection between that fact and his current, letter-writing perspective is left fuzzy until the end.

While the story rambles a bit, especially in the middle of Balram's stint as a lackey, the writing makes up for it. Balram has no sympathy for anyone--including himself--and Adiga keeps up the darkly humorous tone very nicely. Balram is essentially a coarse sociopath, so anyone looking for a noble Slumdog message should probably look elsewhere. But even without that kind of sentimentality, the absurdity of the characters is grounded by the starkness of India's inequalities.

I don't think The White Tiger revolutionizes literature, but it certainly gives a novel perspective on postcolonial India. It yanks away all the gauzy mystique put up by writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, and goes straight for the everyday: the petty politics, the call centers we know we're reaching when "Bob" answers the Verizon help line.

Parts I liked:

"I don't go to 'red light districts' anymore, Mr. Jiabao. It's not right to buy and sell women who live in birdcages and get treated like animals. I only buy girls I find in five-star hotels."

"White men will be finished within my lifetime. There are blacks and reds too, but I have no idea what they're up to--the radio never talks about them. My humble prediction: in twenty years' time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we'll rule the whole world. And God save everyone else."

"Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life--possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth."