The story centers around one Prem Rustum, a 75 year old novelist of Indian origin, and his obsession with a 25 year old young woman. Behind his exceedingly mild-mannered exterior, Prem is actually a genius to end all geniuses. There’s nothing Prem can’t do – he has won the Nobel Prize, the Booker, the Legion d’honneur and the National Book Award, but he also spends 26 weeks on the top of the New York Times Bestseller List (anyone care to tell me when was the last time a Nobel Prize winning author did this? Last time I checked the NYT Bestseller List was dominated by the likes of Dan Brown). His novels are angsty, spontaneous and erotically exciting to women everywhere (even though he never writes about sex), but they are also novels of ideas, structural miracles of sound, insightful political commentaries, explorations of the essence of India, Paris and the United States, and so meticulously plotted that his probabilistic blueprints for them have helped computer scientists make seminal advances in their understanding of human thought (I swear I’m not making this up!). Nor is Prem a slouch in his personal life. He’s seduced hundreds of women – including two French 16 year olds when he was 65 - mostly on the strength of his handsome good looks and magnetic charm. He’s capable of historic erections, but is also an incredibly gentle lover, with hands that can bring a woman to orgasm just by stroking her, and a kiss that makes his partner feel “like Galatea coming alive to Pygmalion’s kiss” (shudder!). Oh, he’s also a doting grandfather, a loyal friend, etc. Ms. Dawesar isn’t kind enough to tell us whether he can leap tall buildings in a single bound, but it seems fairly likely.  

The one thing this paragon is not, though, is articulate. He says things like “Don’t forget which side your bread is buttered on” (as though the final preposition were really required) and “Is your life like this? Full of instant gratification” (ah, ‘instant gratification’, such an original phrase). He calls women ‘babes’, or, when he’s actually with them, addresses them, in an insufferably patronizing manner, as “miss” or “young lady” or “dear”. When the woman he’s infatuated with sends him an online message asking “Do you think desire can be totally arbitrary?” the best this Nobel prize winning super-author can come up with is: “Not just arbitrary, but even anonymous, as in this case.” And when he finally meets her, he doesn’t charm her socks off with words, instead he offers to read her palm, and talks about her “kismet” and her “Mount of Venus”. I knew teenagers back in college who were subtler and had more skill with words. Hell, I was one of them.  

For someone whose whole life is writing, Prem is also curiously silent on anything to do with books. In the entire 338 pages of the novel there isn’t a single discussion about any actual books, no insightful remarks about other writers (other than those Dawesar has made up) or about the process of writing. Okay, so writers don’t need to talk about books all the time, but surely they could occasionally lapse into conversations about them. And remember, Prem is desperately trying to have an affair with a young writer one-third his age. Surely the most obvious thing to do if you’re a Nobel prize winner and a 75 year old coming on to a 25 year old fellow writer, is to talk about writing? But this is the best that Prem can come up with (to help his beloved address her writer’s block): “This is the life of a reader. And most writers are readers too. It happens to everyone”. (Did I mention Prem’s talent for stating the entirely obvious. And then getting it wrong. What does ‘most writers are readers too’ mean? What writers are not readers?) 

The point, if you haven’t already figured it out, is that Prem is an entirely artificial character, who reads like some 13 year old schoolgirl’s fantasy about what a famous writer would be like and who, but for Dawesar’s repeated reminders that he’s a great author, would seem far more compelling as a movie star. Dawesar spends a lot of time trying to convince us how great a writer Prem is, but she never really gives us a compelling reason to believe this. We’re told that his prose is electric and given some gobbledygook about his experiments with alliteration, but that’s pretty much it. In the whole novel, this is the most in-depth look we’re given into what Prem’s writing is about: 

“India turning into a dishonest woman, a loose woman, as she succumbed to license raj, pimped by every small-time office babu, chaprasi, peon, bureaucrat, politician. India manipulated and demeaned, her democratic institutions ridiculed and finally denuded of her democracy like Draupadi, when her sari was unraveled in public.”  

Now doesn’t that sound exciting and original? 

Not that Prem is the only ersatz character in the novel. This is a book that specializes in them. There’s also Maya, Prem’s love interest, who is ‘a promising young writer’ who has just won the Paris Fiction Fellowship. Maya’s claim to being a budding writer comes from the fact that she works with a science magazine of some sort and has been to India and come back with a notebook that she plans to use to write a book “about India” (whatever that means) – and therefore, logically, has to be in Paris to write it! There’s no suggestion that Maya actually has a plot / idea in mind for this book, so it’s perhaps a good thing that it never actually gets written. Maya claims her inability to write stems from the fact that Prem’s words and his presence have eclipsed her – personally I think she can’t write because she’s a talentless little yoga-loving spoilt brat airhead.  

Oh, and there’s also Pascal, the other Great Writer (in Dawesar’s world, all of current literature consists of the writings of three men – called, nauseatingly enough, the 3 P’s – one of whom is now dead; no one else seems to write anymore, no one except Prem seems to have won the Nobel Prize), who also happens to be, conveniently enough, Prem’s closest friend. True to stereotype Pascal is sensual and lecherous (he has to be, you see, he’s French!) and like all the other writers in this book seems to have a very marginal interest in any actual writing, choosing to get his work done only when he has time off from his hectic social life.  

And so the story follows its clichéd path. 75-year old boy meets girl. Girl finds herself strangely attracted to him (the mere sensation of his finger on her neck sends her practically into hysterics). After some 250 meandering pages, full of entirely gratuitous and largely improbable sex [1], ham-handed talk about ‘Art’ (“Reading Prem Rustum’s books was like looking at one of Klimt’s extravagant gold paintings like Danae”), entirely fake platitudes about Life, Writing and Love (whose only purpose seems to be to show us that Ms. Dawesar has taken undergraduate courses in Philosophy), some very cheesy repartee, a cast of auxiliary characters who sound and act like extras in an Almodovar film [2] and a frequently illogical plot whose only discernable principle seems to be that Ms. Dawesar puts down whatever image / idea happens to be uppermost in her mind, Maya and Prem (to no one’s surprise, not even their own) finally get together, thus putting us all out of our collective misery. By the end of the book, Prem has given up Literature for the sake of feeling (a choice that Ms. Dawesar clearly empathises with, since she seems to have done the same) and Maya has grown into an older, wiser woman. Now who could have seen that coming?  

Nor is Ms. Dawesar’s prose particularly noteworthy. Describing her heroine’s sensations after meeting her hero, Dawesar writes: “Maya did not just remember but felt again exactly how she had felt in Prem’s presence, like a very young flower receiving the first rays of the vernal sun and opening up to the world”. Describing her heroine leaving a bakery in Paris, Dawesar says: “She exited the shop feeling light-headed, wanting to share a dessert with Prem, and then threw a last rapacious, lascivious look at the window display from outside”. I can’t believe stuff like this gets published.  

It’s a pity, given Ms. Dawesar’s obvious admiration for Philip Roth, that she hasn’t read his books more carefully – she quotes from The Ghost Writer and from The Dying Animal, but if she’d paid more attention to Roth’s writing, she would see how a credible though vulnerable literary giant is really created, and how the dramatic tension of a relationship between a young woman and an older man is made to come alive. Given how derivative her plot is, it’s a shame she seems to have learnt nothing useful from Roth’s writing.  

In the end, perhaps the most telling moment in the book is the inevitable scene where Maya’s exotic name gets discussed. “Maya is magic”, we are told. No, actually, Maya is illusion. Ms. Dawesar may think her writing is magical, but she’s deluding herself – this is not the real thing, not even close. It’s fool’s gold, and fairly dull fool’s gold at that. The only reason to read this book all the way through is if you’ve promised Sidin a review for next week’s Hafta and it’s too late to get your hands on anything else.  
 

[1] Did you know there are places in France where nubile young farmer’s daughters from the mid-western United States will have passionate sex with 65 year old writers they’ve never heard of, just because they buy them a drink? I need to get me a ticket to one of these places.  

[2] To Dawesar’s credit, she seems to lose interest in her own characters almost as fast as her readers do, so that many of her more forgettable characters actually end up being forgotten, even within the story itself.

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