A Suitable Boy
One of the longest novels in English is fundamentally a love story. Lata's choice between three very different men in post-Partition India. Seth writes with Austenian social intelligence and a vast historical canvas; the love stories are inseparable from the birth of a nation. A doorstop that reads like a sprint.
Length is the complaint every reader lands on first, and more than one wished whole stretches had been cut. The parliamentary debates and an extended shoe-manufacturing subplot draw the sharpest fire, with more than one reviewer naming the passages about the local shoe industry as the parts they skimmed. The sprawling cast and similar-sounding names make it hard to track who is who, and some readers keep a family tree at hand just to follow along. A reviewer compares the experience to “eating Turkish Delight morning noon and night,” rich past the point of pleasure. Kirkus calls it “fat...but fatuous,” with “background-India the very stuffed pillow of local color.” Some find the central romantic dilemma resolves in a way that deflates rather than pays off, anticlimactic after over a thousand pages of buildup, and a minority find the cast “Unbearably cute.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
