Random Notes

In outline, “The Dark Room” has similarities to Richard Yates’s first novel, “Revolutionary Road” (1961). Both tell the sadly familiar story of a philandering businessman husband and a miserable homemaker wife. Yates documents the psychological steps—difficult childhood, disappointing adolescence, missteps in adulthood and marriage—that lead the wife, April Wheeler, to end her life. (In Narayan's novel), by contrast ... by novel’s end, Savitri has returned home to her husband, to serve him as before. There, she is no less miserable, no more fulfilled. Nothing changes. For the Western reader accustomed to the psychological novel of action and outcome, such a story can seem oddly unsatisfying. Western novels about women whose lives are denied free exercise of will—Anna Karenina; Emma Bovary; Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth”; Florence Dowell in “The Good Soldier”; Edna Pontellier in “The Awakening”—have often charted a progression of cause and effect that makes comprehensible, even inevitable, a woman’s final, metaphorical flight to the river. But in Narayan’s world, while there is the same impulse to slough off one’s bonds, it is always without outlet. Indeed, in Narayan’s early novels .... all try to flee their frustratingly narrow lives by running away from home, but, like pigeons to their coops, they cannot help returning. In their very form, these novels, in which conflict finds neither psychological justification nor narrative resolution, register “Indian problems” with a cartographer’s watchtower remove: Narayan is showing us the shape of a people being strangled by the contour of their land.