Is Arundhati Roy a Goddess of Big Lies?

Great Literary Frauds of Our Time
By John Dolan

FRAUD #1 Suzanne Arundhati Roy: The Goddess of Big Lies

She was voted one of the “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” by
People Magazine. That was in 1998; she’s officially “in her late
thirties” now, her age blurring like her prose; but it will always be
her very young self which stares out from the book jackets of her one
and only novel. Her face is turned toward the camera with a sleepy,
pouting expression straight out of Playboy, her winsome curls as damp
as her big brown eyes, her reassuringly Aryan features conveniently
enclosed by demonstrably non-white skin.

Her interviews, usually conducted by a trembling, menopausal
Commonwealth zhurnalistka, slither toward softcore when describing
her: “An explosion of curly black hair…showcases nearly childlike,
saucer eyes and cheekbones that erupt the moment she talks or smiles.”

She is “the first Indian citizen to win a Booker Prize and a million-
dollar book deal.” She copyrighted the whole high-culture section of
the “intercaste lovemaking” market — and remember, that’s the biggest
market of all, the basis of bodice-rippers like Mandingo, She Was A
Pirate’s Booty, Barbarian Concubine, and Captive Princess. Her novel
is praised around the world by dotards like John Updike, who drove the populist ball straight onto the green by calling it “a Tiger Woodsian
debut.” But most of her fans prefer to praise her writing in terms
like “luscious,” “sensual,” and “extravagant” — the rhetoric of high-
priced ice-cream bars.

She is also a saint, the latest great Aryan hope from the land which
gave us Gandhi, Nehru and the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh — virtually all of the most tedious saints of the last century. She is said to have
left home at 16 to live in a squatter’s colony in Delhi, earning a
living collecting beer bottles. Our Lady of Recycling, who even in
starvation made a career of high-profile virtue. She is supposed to be
the pure product of the fertile soil of Kerala, site of her one and only novel. Like all Indian saints, her dream is to scold the rich and successful countries for their lack of…their lack of…something or
other. Virtue, poverty, skin diseases, flies around the eyes…something. She put her nobel-prizewinning life on the line to oppose a dam which would displace thousands of villagers.

And she is a fraud. A literary careerist who has parlayed an
overwritten melodrama into unearned fame; a child of privilege whose
early experiments in poverty were no more than a smart career move; a Yuppie whose real job was aerobics instructor, not slum bottle-
recycler; a world-travelled, overeducated dilettante posing as a
regional writer; and a fake saint who fucked her way to fame and
survives, in spite of her complete lack of talent, because her crude
scolding warms the heart of old British lefties who love it when their
tame Indian slaves get up on their hind legs to denounce the bloody
Americans, who oppress the world so much less skillfully than they
used to.

Her most public, most embarrassing slip came in her noble struggle
against the dam. She was given a three month jail sentence for
obstructing the builders. Gandhi-like, she went to jail…then slunk
out after 24 hours, opting to pay a 75-rupee ($1.50) fine rather than
show solidarity with the humble prisoners. It seems she found an
Indian prison much less spiritual than she had imagined. Rather dirty,
in fact. 24 hours was just time enough to be photographed behind bars, looking fierce and defiant; after that there was no point in staying
in such an unsanitary place.

At least some of her fans are honest about why they love her: “I like
Arundhati Roy more because of [her articles] than the fiction,” admits
the owner of a fansite. Roy herself is very nervous about when, or
whether, she will produce any more novels (“I don’t believe I must
write another book just because I’m a ‘writer'”); obviously, she would
prefer to drop the pretense of literary writing and focus on the
production of moral essays.

Try to read her Booker-Prize winning novel, The God of Small Things,
and you soon see why Roy is so cagey about whether she’ll ever risk
writing fiction again. There’s a pattern to overpraised first novels:
they all begin with a big, neon sign announcing the “theme” which will
be thrashed out in the rest of the book. Roy’s novel is a classic of
the breed; by the end of page one, even a mongoose could figure out
the thesis: “Roy’s juxtaposition of the wonderful fecundity of the
Indian landscape, contrasted with the cruel and arbitrary rules
controlling how people can love.”

It’s all there, in the first paragraph of the novel — poppin’ off the
page like an aerobics instructor sweatin’ her Danskins off to a hot
Bollywood beat:

“May in Ayemenem [pronounced “Eminem”] is a hot, brooding month…But by early June…the countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf-strewn driveway.”

Poor old D. H. Lawrence, trying to get all Freudian with that freezing
Yorkshire climate! If the poor bastard had just gone to Kerala, where
pepper vines snake up electric poles and rat snakes rub themselves
against glistening stones while drenched mongooses jerk off into
scummy ponds, he would’ve realized how much easier it is to sex up a
landscape where the temperature is a steady 120 degrees in the shade.

It might seem a tad derivative to do D. H. Lawrence seventy years
after Lawrence; but that’s the beauty of claiming a new provincial
landscape for yourself, as Roy claimed Kerala: you can do the old
tricks all over again, and still get full credit! You’re a primitive
artist, not a plagiarist!

And if you weld the old Laurentian horny-landscape rhetoric onto a
classic middlebrow ideology — ie, “Love is good, while anti-love
rules are bad” — well, you da big Bombay dotheaded nuke BOMB, baby! The next big thing at the Starbucks Book Club! Poisonwood Bible with a tabla beat! The Shipping News with extra masala! Hold the dahl and pass the adjectives!

That’s the recipe for Goddess of Small Things, and it cooked up very
nicely for Roy. Her babbling tale of innocent nature vs. evil prejudice worked because, far from being a primitive work by a third-world novelist, it was simply an Indian version of that tedious high-school tearjerker, To Kill A Mockingbird.

Roy herself was unwise enough to admit her debt to the Mockingbird in an early interview. The acknowledgment slipped out while she was
bemoaning the tedium of being compared to the great novelists of the
past century. Ah, how tiresome! The poor kid! Her complaint has to be read in full to get an idea of her astounding vanity:

“It’s not just Rushdie that I’m compared to. There’s Garcia-Marquez,
Joyce…and Faulkner. Yes, I’m compared to Faulkner the most. But I’ve never read Faulkner before! I have, however, read some other writers from the American South — Mark Twain, Harper S. Lee [author of To Kill A Mockingbird] — and I think that perhaps there’s an infusion or intrusion of landscape in their literature that might be similar to mine.”

In acknowledging her debt to Harper Lee, Roy admitted more than she knew. To Kill A Mockingbird is the true ancestor of The God of Small
Things. Like Roy’s novel, it reduces an intricate and accursed
landscape, the American South, to a simple clash of patronizing
middle-class virtue and trashy local prejudice solved with a grand
courtroom drama. Roy takes the even older and more vicious landscape of Southern India and subjects it to an equally simple cleansing via the redemptive power of hot intercaste fucking.

The God of Small Things is a hit with coffeehouse book clubs now for
the same reason that To Kill A Mockingbird was a hit with Reader’s
Digest types fifty years ago. Both affirm the dim simplicities:
Children are innocent; grownups are bad. Love is good; prejudice is
bad.

So why has this one-hit wonder become such a prestigious essayist? And that’s where Roy’s second career comes into the picture. If you want a really reliable career as a vendor of pious lies, the essay is the way to go. It’s good to have that first novel on your CV for ballast, but
for a steady career it’s better to become a professional denouncer of
evil.

Roy was in position when 9/ll happened, ready to scold on front pages
all over the world–or at least the big chunk of it that used to be
British. Within a few weeks, she produced an astounding article called
“the Algebra of Infinite Justice,” originally printed in the Guardian
but since disseminated by email through all the laid-off countries
which once produced the middle managers of the British Empire.

From Canada to New Zealand, you hear Roy’s article quoted with glee by grumpy old white men who usually respond with bitter letters to the
editor when the local aboriginals get stroppy. Yet these bilious old
racists simply melt when Roy’s big brown eyes appear. The paradox is
not really so hard to understand. Roy, for the old Anglos, is a
convenient little brown stick with which to beat the Americans, whom
the grumpy old Anglos hate even more than they hate the Abos. The
Americans put these guys out of an Empire-managing job, and they will never forgive that or lose their conviction that the world was
oppressed far better under the Union Jack than the Stars and Stripes.

Roy’s article has as its touchingly simple thesis the gloating notion
that — and this is a direct quote — “what goes around comes around.”
It would be difficult to think of a more self-evidently false assertion about the world. If what went around ever actually came around, Roy and her sponsors would not exist — because if ever a culture inflicted horrors on the world, it was Victorian Britain. Yet no divine lightning ever struck that lucky, bloodstained Empire.

Karma schmarma; Roy’s real argument, the one which makes her so
beloved of the grumpy old Brits, is much simpler: ha ha on you upstart
Americans. She made this much clearer in one of her most recent nag-
essays, this one on nuclear war. (She’s against it.) She paints the
usual picture of nuclear horror, a tableau perfected 50 years ago,
then assigns blame:

“But let us pause to give credit where it’s due. Whom must we thank
for all this? The Men who made it happen. The Masters of the Universe. Isn’t that lovely? It almost justifies the notion of Arundhati Roy as true moral crusader — because with enemies like that, nuclear weapons begin to look pretty good. After all, why has no one spoken up in favor of nuclear winter? It would certainly silence Roy. In
particular, a nuclear war between Pakistan and India has a lot to
recommend it, above all the extinction of God knows how many plaster saints on the Gandhi/Roy/Baghwan model.

Perhaps she will go down in intellectual history as a true Kali, the
bringer of destruction — the mother of the Great Winter. It would be
the antithesis of all that Roy represents: a cold silence, a complete
answer to the fecund heat of her animate Kerala landscape.

So scold on, Arundhati! Preach against the nukes till we all long for
them, and the inclusive answer they offer to the terrible prospect of
you, and your successors, remaining at the podium for another eon.
Hail the Winter that has no Spring!

ENRON’S “Great Literary Frauds of Our Time” with host Dr. John Dolan will return next issue with another exciting installment!

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  Pastor

  unitedchurch@eml.cc