An overweight plodder

Weight Loss by Upamannyu Chatterjee: New Delhi: Penguin India.

This little history comes to mind, at the prospect of reviewing Upamannyu Chatterjee's latest book, because in the eighties few debuts seemed more promising than his 1988 charmer English, August: An Indian Story. It recounted the tale of a disenchanted, young, urban Indian, entering the Civil Service. Just as Indians had thrilled to Midnight's Children for capturing the disappointment of their passions, similarly they were delighted in English, August to find an irreverent confirmation of the pettiness of their world, and their times. The task sounds simple enough, but only one who has tried it knows how hard it is to conjure such magic. In English, August, it was done marvelously; then its author disappeared.

Chatterjee has hovered on the horizon since then with a family tale, The Last Burden (1993), and a return to Agastya, the hero of the first book, with The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), but sadly, neither of those books approached the biting freshness of the debut. Unfortunately, Chatterjee's latest novel, Weight Loss, is even farther off the mark.

Weight Loss tells the story of a picaresque character, Bhola, in terms of his sexual passages. The novel is organized into ten chapters that correspond roughly to a chronological account of Bhola's eight lovers --some unconsummated -- both men and women. Bhola dies young, having lived a life that was amoral, not entirely satisfying to himself, nor instructive to others, and worst of all for a fictional life, not entertaining for any readers.

Late in the novel, the narrator remarks that Bhola's bio read as if all the usual things had happened to him "but all at the wrong time." In truth, a great many things that happen to Bhola -- coerced sex with both members of an under-class couple; performing sexual surgery, with no medical degrees, on another man; getting shot in the park by an ex-lover, etc -- are anything but usual. Furthermore, all the things that happen to Bhola, the unusual and usual -- graduation, marriage and child -- happen to him at quite appropriate times. In view of these facts, the narrator's remark must be treated as erroneous, and symptomatic of the lack of attention that is the root cause of this book's failure.

The inattentions that cripple this novel start with the premise. At no point does it become clear why Bhola's life is worth the telling. For all his deviancy, Bhola's character remains as uninteresting as his sexual peccadilloes are pointless. Possibly the author was not imaginatively engaged to a sufficient degree by the subject of his own choosing. Why then did he persist with it? No broad moral, psychological or social point is illustrated through Bhola's character or sexual obsessions. Even to use sex in the service of some other narrative purpose, establishing character or illuminating their circumstances, would call for more imaginative brio than what we have evidence of here.

If the author's purpose was simply to shock or entertain the reader with sexual deviancies of an otherwise uninteresting and unsympathetic character, it was probably not a purpose worth four hundred pages of labor for either author or reader. Over two centuries after Casanova or Sade, decades after Bataille and Nin -- to name only the French! -- a lot more is expected from an author, if sex is indeed to be his main subject. If the point was to expose the moral degradations of living in a repressive society, then too the job has not been done with any great merits of style or insight. For a contrasting contemporary example from the region, readers may turn to Akhil Sharma's daring and devastating portraiture of sexual and moral turpitude in An Obedient Father.

The lack of imagination, or attention, is evident in the writing, both in substance and style. After all his escapades, Bhola notes that sex was not a "mystical...sacred force," but a "headache," because when "one wasn't getting it, one became irritable and snapped at everybody." Only the most juvenile sense of humor might be entertained by so banal a statement. Noticeably, the writing is least successful when dealing with Bhola's deviant excesses, or attempting a generality. By contrast, passages treating more ordinary situations come alive, because the moments are imagined minutely. Best examples of such rare successes occur during the episode with Bhola's teen crush, Anin.

During one of their earliest encounters with a possibility of physical intimacy, seated beside a supine Anin, Bhola wonders "if the next move was to be his," since he "couldn't imagine her going any further without some encouragement from him." Later, when Anin favors Bhola's best friend, meeting them made Bhola feel "as if he had been bypassed completely by the warmth of companionship." These lines ring true with adolescent confusion and anguish, and the writing, unforced and simple, is effective.

In further evidence of similar writing, the hill town where Bhola arrives for college is described as a place where "colonial-styled bungalows spread out like sated royalty amidst terraced field and wooded incline." Sadly, such focused, clean writing comprises the leaner portion of the book. Too much of it is stuffed with sentences that feel forced and clunky. There is an overuse of Latinate words that does not feel like a deliberate or successful choice, but a default setting for the narrator, deriving perhaps from an overexposure to legalistic or bureaucratic language. There is no real sense of a voice or tone, certainly none conducive to the story or the character, nor any purposeful variations of pacing or rhythm, at the level of either the narrative or sentences.

As a reviewer, and especially as a great fan of Chatterjee's first book, one finds absolutely no pleasure in having to criticize his latest effort. This duty is especially frustrating since anyone willing to suffer through the novel will see that with some attention to the basics of fiction, and some hard editing, an entertaining little lark might have been rescued from the folds of this -- pardon the pun, overweight -- plodder. Yet, somehow Chatterjee, who displayed such lightness and deftness of touch in his famed first book - released just last April as a New York Review of Books classic -- could not be bothered even to do due diligence. Fans can only hope that he will equal or excel his debut before that first book comes to be regarded as the lucky accident in an otherwise unremarkable oeuvre.

Kazi Anis Ahmed is the Director, Academic Affairs at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.