The New Canon focuses on
great works of fiction
published since 1985. These
books represent the finest
literature of the current era,
and are gaining recognition as
the new classics of our time. In
this installment of The New
Canon, Ted Gioia reviews The
White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
great works of fiction
published since 1985. These
books represent the finest
literature of the current era,
and are gaining recognition as
the new classics of our time. In
this installment of The New
Canon, Ted Gioia reviews The
White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
How things change! The novel of social mobility was once a
trademark of American fiction. Perhaps its transfer overseas is to
be expected, but when India—the traditional home of a hidebound
caste system—steps forward as the setting
of a grand contemporary rags-to-riches
story, the implications are clear. Even the
world of fiction, it seems, is flat.
Then again, Horatio Alger might not recog-
nize his offspring in The White Tiger the
debut novel by Aravind Adiga and recipient
of the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Balram
Halwai, our ambitious hero, may be a
successful “entrepreneur” in Bangalore,
but he readily admits in the opening pages
that he needed to commit murder, robbery
and assorted other peccadilloes in order to
get his start-up funded. Instead of venture capital he relied on
vengeance capital, and the returns have been spectacular.
All the world loves a lover…and a cutthroat businessman too. As
popular TV shows such from Dallas to Mad Men have made clear,
audiences prefer the men in suits a little on the sleazy side. But
when it comes to cutthroat, Balram is not content with a merely
metaphorical interpretation of the term. He rises from the streets to
a position as chauffeur to a wealthy family, then kills his boss with
the jagged end of a broken Johnny Walker bottle. Then he absconds
with a big bag of cash.
Oh, did I mention that this is a humorous novel? Dark humor,
needless to say…as may be appropriate for a story set primarily in
the part of India that Halwai calls The Darkness. He sees his own
life as a passage into the light, but along the way he jettisons almost
every meaningful relationship or code of values—brother,
grandmother, boss, religion, the law—in his ascent to independence
and prosperity. If this were a twelve step program, the opening
mantra would be: “acknowledge no higher power than your own self-
interest.”
Is this what happens when a country moves outside the orbit of its
own traditions without robust new institutions to take their place?
Perhaps. But I’m not sure whether one should read The White Tiger
as primarily a work of social or political commentary. I find that I
could get swept up in the crazy momentum of the story, provided I
didn’t stop along the way to debate with the narrator. If you are of a
certain age, you might remember when Timothy Leary toured with
G. Gordon Liddy to conduct public debates on the soul of America.
Entering into a dialogue with Balram Halwai might just be the Indian
equivalent of the same.
But the pacing and sheer manic sweep of this narrative are
irresistible. Have you ever gone on a trip with a cynical and comic
traveling companion who has something biting and wickedly funny
to say at every stop on your journey? Halwai is just such a guide to
modern-day India, and his comments cover everything and
anything: family, marriage, sanitation, politics, police, booze,
religion, shopping malls, water buffalo, traffic, fashion, schools, you
name it.
The story is presented in the form of an epistolary novel. Halwai,
aka the White Tiger, is writing a series of letters to Chinese Premier
Wen Jiabao. Wen is planning to visit Bangalore, and our murderous
protagonist wants to give him a different perspective than the
official version. “Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the
Chinese people, and also in belief that the future of the world lies
with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile
master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery,
cell phone usage and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge,
the truth about Bangalore.”
The Bangalore business day is really a business night. So much of
the economy is driven by call centers that handle out-sourced
customer service work from America, an entrepreneur such as
Halwai finds his most productive hours begin after midnight. But
even when his work his done, our self-proclaimed White Tiger stays
up until the wee hours preparing his long missives for his Beijing
penpal. The novel is divided into seven letters from composed on
seven nights. At the beginning they occasionally embrace the
stately tone of an official communiqué, but by the end of the book
they sound more like another kind of late night confessional, those
found at the neighborhood cocktail lounge where inebriated
habitués share secrets best kept under wraps to a silent bartender.
The Chinese premier is treated to accounts of the deaths of Halwai’s
parents, his all-too-brief school days, his escape from the
machinations of his surviving relatives, his contrivances in securing
a job as a driver to a wealthy and corrupt family, and his increasing
independence of mind after he moves to the big city. Our
protagonist vacillates from self-confident proclamations to
apologies for his “half-baked” ideas. But give him credit, he comes
up with a philosophy of life on his own that is a reasonably close
approximation of Nietzsche’s world view. I’ll leave it up to you to
decide whether that is to his credit or shame.
Moral judgments aside, our narrator (and his behind-the-scenes
author) know how to spin a story. Adiga’s previous publication
experiences, before this breakthrough novel, came mostly via
journalistic writing for the Financial Times, Money, and Time. You
can occasionally trace the lineage in The White Tiger—am I going
too far to see a connection between our Bangalore “entrepreneur”
and Donald Trump, whom Adiga once interviewed for an article?—
but the punchy, irreverent attitude of this book is the real hook. V.
S. Naipaul this is not; more like a post-colonial Kingsley Amis.
As our narrator reminds us, the white tiger is the rarest of creatures.
It shows up only once in a generation. For an author of Indian
ancestry to win the Booker Prize is almost as rare—that happens
once a decade, on average. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this white
tiger makes a return appearance, at least on the shortlist, before too
long.
by Aravind Adiga
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
How things change! The novel of social mobility was once a
trademark of American fiction. Perhaps its transfer overseas is to
be expected, but when India—the traditional home of a hidebound
caste system—steps forward as the setting
of a grand contemporary rags-to-riches
story, the implications are clear. Even the
world of fiction, it seems, is flat.
Then again, Horatio Alger might not recog-
nize his offspring in The White Tiger the
debut novel by Aravind Adiga and recipient
of the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Balram
Halwai, our ambitious hero, may be a
successful “entrepreneur” in Bangalore,
but he readily admits in the opening pages
that he needed to commit murder, robbery
and assorted other peccadilloes in order to
get his start-up funded. Instead of venture capital he relied on
vengeance capital, and the returns have been spectacular.
All the world loves a lover…and a cutthroat businessman too. As
popular TV shows such from Dallas to Mad Men have made clear,
audiences prefer the men in suits a little on the sleazy side. But
when it comes to cutthroat, Balram is not content with a merely
metaphorical interpretation of the term. He rises from the streets to
a position as chauffeur to a wealthy family, then kills his boss with
the jagged end of a broken Johnny Walker bottle. Then he absconds
with a big bag of cash.
Oh, did I mention that this is a humorous novel? Dark humor,
needless to say…as may be appropriate for a story set primarily in
the part of India that Halwai calls The Darkness. He sees his own
life as a passage into the light, but along the way he jettisons almost
every meaningful relationship or code of values—brother,
grandmother, boss, religion, the law—in his ascent to independence
and prosperity. If this were a twelve step program, the opening
mantra would be: “acknowledge no higher power than your own self-
interest.”
Is this what happens when a country moves outside the orbit of its
own traditions without robust new institutions to take their place?
Perhaps. But I’m not sure whether one should read The White Tiger
as primarily a work of social or political commentary. I find that I
could get swept up in the crazy momentum of the story, provided I
didn’t stop along the way to debate with the narrator. If you are of a
certain age, you might remember when Timothy Leary toured with
G. Gordon Liddy to conduct public debates on the soul of America.
Entering into a dialogue with Balram Halwai might just be the Indian
equivalent of the same.
But the pacing and sheer manic sweep of this narrative are
irresistible. Have you ever gone on a trip with a cynical and comic
traveling companion who has something biting and wickedly funny
to say at every stop on your journey? Halwai is just such a guide to
modern-day India, and his comments cover everything and
anything: family, marriage, sanitation, politics, police, booze,
religion, shopping malls, water buffalo, traffic, fashion, schools, you
name it.
The story is presented in the form of an epistolary novel. Halwai,
aka the White Tiger, is writing a series of letters to Chinese Premier
Wen Jiabao. Wen is planning to visit Bangalore, and our murderous
protagonist wants to give him a different perspective than the
official version. “Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the
Chinese people, and also in belief that the future of the world lies
with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile
master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery,
cell phone usage and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge,
the truth about Bangalore.”
The Bangalore business day is really a business night. So much of
the economy is driven by call centers that handle out-sourced
customer service work from America, an entrepreneur such as
Halwai finds his most productive hours begin after midnight. But
even when his work his done, our self-proclaimed White Tiger stays
up until the wee hours preparing his long missives for his Beijing
penpal. The novel is divided into seven letters from composed on
seven nights. At the beginning they occasionally embrace the
stately tone of an official communiqué, but by the end of the book
they sound more like another kind of late night confessional, those
found at the neighborhood cocktail lounge where inebriated
habitués share secrets best kept under wraps to a silent bartender.
The Chinese premier is treated to accounts of the deaths of Halwai’s
parents, his all-too-brief school days, his escape from the
machinations of his surviving relatives, his contrivances in securing
a job as a driver to a wealthy and corrupt family, and his increasing
independence of mind after he moves to the big city. Our
protagonist vacillates from self-confident proclamations to
apologies for his “half-baked” ideas. But give him credit, he comes
up with a philosophy of life on his own that is a reasonably close
approximation of Nietzsche’s world view. I’ll leave it up to you to
decide whether that is to his credit or shame.
Moral judgments aside, our narrator (and his behind-the-scenes
author) know how to spin a story. Adiga’s previous publication
experiences, before this breakthrough novel, came mostly via
journalistic writing for the Financial Times, Money, and Time. You
can occasionally trace the lineage in The White Tiger—am I going
too far to see a connection between our Bangalore “entrepreneur”
and Donald Trump, whom Adiga once interviewed for an article?—
but the punchy, irreverent attitude of this book is the real hook. V.
S. Naipaul this is not; more like a post-colonial Kingsley Amis.
As our narrator reminds us, the white tiger is the rarest of creatures.
It shows up only once in a generation. For an author of Indian
ancestry to win the Booker Prize is almost as rare—that happens
once a decade, on average. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this white
tiger makes a return appearance, at least on the shortlist, before too
long.
| The New Canon |
| The Best in Fiction Since 1985 |
The New Canon
Home Page
Gabriel García Márquez:
Love in the Time of Cholera
David Foster Wallace:
Infinite Jest
Margaret Atwood:
The Handmaid's Tale
Toni Morrison:
Beloved
Jonathan Franzen:
The Corrections
Don DeLillo:
Underworld
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth
Roberto Bolaño:
2666
Mark Z. Danielewski:
House of Leaves
Cormac McCarthy:
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth:
American Pastoral
Jonathan Lethem:
The Fortress of S0litude
Haruki Murakami:
Kafka on the Shore
Edward P. Jones:
The Known World
Ian McEwan:
Atonement
Michael Chabon:
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
Philip Roth:
The Human Stain
Mario Vargas Llosa:
The Feast of the Goat
Marilynne Robinson:
Gilead
David Mitchell:
Cloud Atlas
José Saramago:
Blindness
Jennifer Egan:
A Visit from the Good Sqad
W. G. Sebald:
Austerlitz
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Donna Tartt:
The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient
Saul Bellow:
Ravelstein
A.S. Byatt:
Possession
Umberto Eco:
Foucault's Pendulum
Cormac McCarthy:
The Road
David Foster Wallace:
The Pale King
J.K. Rowling:
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone
Arundhati Roy:
The God of Small Things
Roberto Bolaño:
The Savage Detectives
Paul Auster:
The New York Trilogy
Per Petterson:
Out Stealing Horses
Ann Patchett:
Bel Canto
Ben Okri:
The Famished Road
Joseph O'Neill:
Netherland
Haruki Murakami:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Marisha Pessl:
Special Topics in Calamity
Physics
Jonathan Franzen:
Freedom
Colm Tóibín:
The Master
Denis Johnson:
Tree of Smoke
Richard Russo:
Empire Falls
Alice Munro:
Runaway
Martin Amis:
London Fields
Mark Haddon:
The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time
John Banville:
The Sea
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
Jeffrey Eugenides:
Middlesex
Junot Diaz:
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
Aravind Adiga:
The White Tiger
Tim O'Brien:
The Things They Carried
Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting
Tobias Wolff:
Old School
Tim Winton:
Cloudstreet
David Foster Wallace:
Oblivion
Oscar Hijuelos:
The Mambo Kings Play
Songs of Love
More to come
Recommended Links:
Great Books Guide
Conceptual Fiction
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's personal web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
American Fiction Notes
LA Review of Books
The Big Read
Critical Mass
The Elegant Variation
Dana Gioia
The Literary Saloon
The Millions
The Misread City
Page-Turner
Page Views
Disclosure note: Writers on this site and its
sister sites may receive promotional copies of
works under review.
Home Page
Gabriel García Márquez:
Love in the Time of Cholera
David Foster Wallace:
Infinite Jest
Margaret Atwood:
The Handmaid's Tale
Toni Morrison:
Beloved
Jonathan Franzen:
The Corrections
Don DeLillo:
Underworld
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth
Roberto Bolaño:
2666
Mark Z. Danielewski:
House of Leaves
Cormac McCarthy:
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth:
American Pastoral
Jonathan Lethem:
The Fortress of S0litude
Haruki Murakami:
Kafka on the Shore
Edward P. Jones:
The Known World
Ian McEwan:
Atonement
Michael Chabon:
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
Philip Roth:
The Human Stain
Mario Vargas Llosa:
The Feast of the Goat
Marilynne Robinson:
Gilead
David Mitchell:
Cloud Atlas
José Saramago:
Blindness
Jennifer Egan:
A Visit from the Good Sqad
W. G. Sebald:
Austerlitz
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Donna Tartt:
The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient
Saul Bellow:
Ravelstein
A.S. Byatt:
Possession
Umberto Eco:
Foucault's Pendulum
Cormac McCarthy:
The Road
David Foster Wallace:
The Pale King
J.K. Rowling:
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone
Arundhati Roy:
The God of Small Things
Roberto Bolaño:
The Savage Detectives
Paul Auster:
The New York Trilogy
Per Petterson:
Out Stealing Horses
Ann Patchett:
Bel Canto
Ben Okri:
The Famished Road
Joseph O'Neill:
Netherland
Haruki Murakami:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Marisha Pessl:
Special Topics in Calamity
Physics
Jonathan Franzen:
Freedom
Colm Tóibín:
The Master
Denis Johnson:
Tree of Smoke
Richard Russo:
Empire Falls
Alice Munro:
Runaway
Martin Amis:
London Fields
Mark Haddon:
The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time
John Banville:
The Sea
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
Jeffrey Eugenides:
Middlesex
Junot Diaz:
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
Aravind Adiga:
The White Tiger
Tim O'Brien:
The Things They Carried
Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting
Tobias Wolff:
Old School
Tim Winton:
Cloudstreet
David Foster Wallace:
Oblivion
Oscar Hijuelos:
The Mambo Kings Play
Songs of Love
More to come
Recommended Links:
Great Books Guide
Conceptual Fiction
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's personal web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
American Fiction Notes
LA Review of Books
The Big Read
Critical Mass
The Elegant Variation
Dana Gioia
The Literary Saloon
The Millions
The Misread City
Page-Turner
Page Views
Disclosure note: Writers on this site and its
sister sites may receive promotional copies of
works under review.