The Literary Mirror

Suri's sprawling family novel covers three generations of the Krishnamurthy family across one very large Chennai house, structured not by year or event but by room — the veranda argument, the kitchen argument, the argument that only ever happens on the stairs because it is the one place nobody can walk away mid-sentence.

It's a formally ambitious book that mostly justifies the ambition; the repetition of certain arguments across decades, in the same rooms, with different family members standing in for the previous generation's positions, builds a cumulative effect longer novels aiming for the same theme often fail to earn.

At just under five hundred pages it overstays its welcome by perhaps sixty of them, particularly in a middle section following a cousin whose subplot never quite connects to the house's larger argument. Even so, this is one of the more interesting family sagas in recent Indian fiction.

“Suri's family doesn't fight about anything, exactly. They fight about everything, at a very specific pitch.”