Read Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, and a month later, maybe less, I suspect that you will remember this novel only impressionistically. You will remember having enjoyed it. You will remember that it took place in India and that its narrator, the chauffeur-turnedentrepreneur Balram Halwai, made you chuckle, usually deliberately. And you will remember that he killed his boss.
As to why Balram kills Mr. Ashok, that you will forget enough to oversimplify, citing poverty or mistreatment. You might note that the start-up capital for Balram’s taxi service is a bag of money stolen from his erstwhile boss, but you will forget the driver’s veneration for the master. The theory of the Rooster Coop will slip your mind.
What’s more, should you, a month after reading The White Tiger, try to explain how this novel amused you despite the fact that, in it, vitiligo stains the skin of the poor and roaches eat paint and the hallowed Ganges is sludge and piss and charred corpses (not that you will recall these details precisely), you will be at a loss. In fact, you will remember just enough about the destitute who mill, like extras, where sewage laps a village’s edge and just enough about those who lord their corruption over the weak and just enough about the murderer-storyteller who, though only a centimeter gentler than ruthless, charmed you that, in retrospect, you will find it nearly impossible to explain how you read this book with what might pass for breezy pleasure.
That said, I am not sure whether The White Tiger’s playing into a reader’s forgetfulness proves Adiga’s flaw or his genius. Undoubtedly, though, the easy pleasure that Adiga contrives for his readers is the catalyst for their forgetting much of what takes place. For instance, by structuring the novel as a series of letters addressed to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (a person no less real than those of us who make up the book’s second, unnamed audience), Adiga absolves the reader of any real involvement in Balram’s tale. Indeed, we readers are, if not quite innocent bystanders, then implicated only in eavesdropping.The organizing trope of The White Tiger, in other words, allows us as readers to assume that we can afford pleasure and forgetting, that we need not enter into the novel’s moral tangle.
The White Tiger shields the reader from engaging the suffering and evil that it records in other ways, too. Take the end of “The First Night,” Balram’s opening missive to Beijing. At this letter’s end, the driver announces that he “slit Mr. Ashok’s throat,” thereby seeing to it that—from this premature point on—suspense hurries us. Thus, we begin to read The White Tiger’s nightly nstallments just as King Shahriyar listened to Shahrazad unravel the tales of The Thousand and One Nights: impatiently. We skim over details. We miss the odd kernel of pathos.
Furthermore, because Adiga converts us, as a set of readers, into an impatient crowd (one that fancies its task is mere spectatorship), he can dimple his narrative with levity. To wit: Balram calls a water buffalo “the most important member of his family.” So, too, Balram sheathes poverty in metaphor, describing the sleeping women of his family, “their legs falling one over the other,” as “one creature, a millipede.” To crooked landlords, he affixes animal nicknames: the Boar, the Stork, the Mongoose. Villainy loses its brutal reality in his reassuringly cartoonish vignettes.
When, on the other hand, Balram cannot forgo profundity—when he records affliction or shame without the buffer of sarcasm —The White Tiger resorts to protecting the reader by other means. Adiga nests the driver’s keenest insights in parentheses. The middle of an exceptionally long sentence, for instance, hides the clause “(no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school).”
All told, the matter stands thus: The White Tiger presupposes a reader whom distance, geographical and fictional, makes flippant, and then Adiga supplies this reader with the tackle necessary to forgetting whatever darkness, in Balram’s story, cannot be shrugged off.
Usher the reader into forgetting, though, and not only do your story’s varied, vivid injustices become a muddle, and perhaps laughable; you also sacrifice your reader’s susceptibility to beauty. Among the casualties of Adiga’s method, then, are the exquisite images that—their likely demise notwithstanding—the writer crafts.
He hazards, along the route to Balram’s mother’s cremation, the “open gymnasium where three body builders heaved rusted weights over their heads.” He risks the similes that trespass on fact, matching, for example, the narrator’s “father’s spine [and] a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells.” And the images that should not be beautiful but are, from a miasma of “sluggish and glossy” car exhaust on up? Those Adiga trusts us to skip or drop, and, by and large, we comply.
But if The White Tiger—winner of the 2008 Booker Man Prize—forfeits gravitas, does so with the expectation of some payoff, a return on the losses to which it consents.
One such return is, as I’ve already suggested, the reader’s easy pleasure. Balram, after all—despite being hemmed in by death, brutality, and indigence —manages to defend his reader’s delight from those ills. He converts even the tenderhearted into listeners whom a baleful tale will divert. He constructs, in fact, a happily captive audience.
Our blithe captivity is not just a narrative effect, however. That we chortle and hustle our way through this story, ready to forget it, is also a verdict on us as readers. Because we do not just sit, prosperous, remote, and forgetful spectators to the fiction told us by Bangalore entrepreneur Balram Halwai; our passivity and amnesia apply, too, to unvarnished reports from Calcutta and Lahore and Mumbai. And neither a great distance nor a short memory will absolve us.
Indeed, The White Tiger exploits our lack of engagement, plotting to sentence us for finding ugliness amusing and beauty invisible. At the very least, we end up in the same caste as Balram, who explains that “in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up.” Balram belongs among the Men with Big Bellies; in fact, just pages later he notes that he has begun to ingest his master, Mr. Ashok. At the same time, though, we readers are glutting ourselves on all The White Tiger’s characters, whose stories we barely taste. Certainly, then, The White Tiger profits by its readers’ greed (which is, according to Balram, a worse liability than the voracity that poverty breeds). Probably it is even the case that the losses sustained by this story pay off. The novel, after all, is, like its narrator, an entrepreneur.
Despite all that profits it, though—and despite its apt critique—The White Tiger strikes me less as a creative feat than a destructive one. Granted, steel and glass crystallize into skyline above Bangalore, and Adiga’s prose is the exquisite document of such progress and, more, the record of Balram Halwai’s evolution. Balram’s letters, though, as a manual for would-be entrepreneurs, command a blight of conscience. And The White Tiger, which capitalizes on its readers’ weaknesses, assuring them that their counterfeit sympathy, amusement, will count as tender —well, it might just bribe its readers into complacency.
Jane Zwart teaches literature at Calvin College and writes poems on the sly. Having defended her dissertation in December, she has begun, once again, to read without a pencil in hand. At least sometimes.
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