Quarterlife

 

Book Review

Title: Quarterlife

Author: Devika Rege

Publisher: HarperCollins Fourth Estate, 2023

Pages: 403

This novel left me quite puzzled. So I returned to it with a staunch determination to read it again because I read some of the rave reviews it had received. What did I miss?

I didn’t read it again entirely. I just couldn’t. It didn’t make that sort of appeal to me. I went through certain parts again. It didn’t create any better impression on me. But it had been long-listed for the Booker and many reviewers of good journals found it excellent. Something within me agreed with those reviews too.

The Hindu said that “every page you turn, the book’s universe mirrors our everyday reality, the hyperfused gaze magnifying the cracks.” The Hindu’s fortnightly publication, Frontline, said that the novel is “thickly packed with ideas that threaten to clog its flow until the narrative changes gear towards the end, saving the day.” The Hindustan Times thought that the author had brought a complex array of characters that are difficult to handle but she did handle them dexterously. The Scroll called it an “ambitious and elegant debut” that “arrived on the scene with elegance and aplomb.” Among all the reviews I read, only The Mint was a bit sceptical. Rege overcooked the writing dictum of show, don’t tell, according to The Mint. The novel has an interesting set-up which meets a flawed execution, judged this review.

I was also left with that kind of a feeling. It is a good work but something fails to fall in place in the final pattern that emerges. That does not mean the writer is not good. On the contrary, here is a very promising work that deserved to be in the long list of the potential Bookers. And I’m sure the author will win the Booker one day not too late. 

Devika Rege

The characters

This novel is primarily about Naren who returns to India abandoning his job in America when the massive victory of the Bharat Party in the 2014 elections promises to bring utopia to India; Amanda who was Naren’s classmate in America and is now in search of a greater purpose in life by taking up a teaching job in India; and Rohit who is Naren’s brother in search of his cultural roots like many people in the post-2014 India. There are other minor characters like Omkar, a Hindu nationalist from a backward caste; Kedar, a leftist investigative journalist; Manasi, an ordinary Indian whose caste background is not particularly eminent; Cyrus, a Parsi gay; Ifra, a Muslim woman; and Gyaan who has come to Maharashtra from Delhi. The plot unfolds in Pune.

We see Bharat Party’s India through the eyes of the above-mentioned young characters. The right wingers among them know that religion is more potent than anything else if you want to create an enemy and that an enemy is essential if you want to wield power like the old kings. But Maharashtra has its own local politics too that is dominated by the Chitpavan Brahmins. “It was a Chitpavan who shot Gandhi” and saved India from the Muslims, they know. “The history of the Chitpavans is the history of modern India,” they assert proudly.

 They list out prominent Chitpavan freedom fighters, social reformers and educators such as Tilak, Gokhale, Phule, Chapekar, and Savarkar. The founder of the RSS [which is rechristened Bharat Bhratritva Samaj in the novel] is a Chitpavan. The Chitpavans have their own joke too: there are only two communities in the world – Chitpavans and others. There is an ironical parallel in the post-2014 India: only two communities – Hindus and others.

But a question arises immediately. Are the Hindus united among themselves? We are told in the novel that the backward castes tasted power under Bharat Party [the fictional name for BJP] and they tortured the Dalits to prove they are supreme Hindus while the upper caste sat and laughed. The power games among the Hindus themselves are as interesting as those outside the community. Even if we make a Hindu Rashtra, change names of places, make Hindi the national language… we will remain the same: fighting for supremacy, seeking our rungs on the hierarchical ladder and exploiting as well as torturing others in the process.

 Gyaan, one of the characters, has an interesting observation about Omkar the nationalist: “The poor idiot. His Brotherhood [RSS which is Bharat Bhratritva Samaj in the novel] is an old upper-caste tyranny that talks caste only on election day, and his Prime Minister wears a luxury shawl gifted by the country’s biggest businessmen.” Hypocrisy runs in the veins of the nationalists in the novel – right from the prime minister to the lowest caste nationalist. They preach cultural nationalism but practise capitalist expediency.

I can go on writing a lot more about this novel. Yet I didn’t like it. Why? I’m wondering again. I don’t know really. I think it’s too clever for me. I prefer novels that touch my heart as powerfully as they poke my intellect.