TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 4/23/97: American Nomad By Steve Erickson Nonfiction 4/22/97: Into Thin Air A Personal Account Of The Mount Everest Disaster By Jon Krakauer Nonfiction 4/21/97: Down by the River By Edna O'Brien Fiction 4/18/97: Petrolio By Pier Paolo Pasolini Fiction 4/17/97: Morvern Callar By Alan Warner Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: The Lightning Rod In praise of Allen Ginsberg (04/16/97) By Herbert Gold RECENT BOOK FEATURES

the god of small things B Y A R U N D H A T I R O Y | R A N D O M H O U S E , 3 2 0 P A G E S BY JENNIFER HOWARD arundhati Roy's rich, humid fairy tale of a novel begins in June, when the monsoon rains send the province of Kerala, in southwestern India, into fecund frenzy: "The countryside turns an immodest green ... Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads." Behind this lush life, however, something festers. Rahel Kochamma, one of the novel's twin protagonists, returns to her family home in the Kerali town of Ayemenem, and decay slithers out to greet her. The house walls "bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against glistening stone." This slithering overripeness hints at what's really rotten in Ayemenem: the past, specifically a chain of events set in motion on "a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent)," when the twins' half-English cousin, Sophie Mol, came to visit. Two weeks later Sophie was dead, drowned in Ayemenem's river, leaving behind a shattered family and a terrible secret. The narrative eddies along toward the secret of Sophie's death, but ultimately it flows into the drowning depths of history. "The God of Small Things" is a story of forbidden, cross-caste love and what a community will do to protect the old ways. The Kochamma family business, Paradise Pickles and Preserves, is emblematic of the theme. Ayemenem is practically pickled in history. Roy, an architect and screenwriter who grew up in Kerala, capably shoulders the burdens of caste and tradition, a double weight that crushes some of her characters and warps others, but leaves none untouched. Roy takes up classic material, but she delights in verbal innovation and stylistic tricks. She runs words together -- "thunderdarkness," "echoing stationsounds" -- and plucks nouns from verbs and verbs from thin air. And she has hit on a striking way of getting at a child's point of view (told in third person, the story unfolds more or less as young Rahel and Estha experience it). When her mother tells a rambunctious Rahel to "Stoppit," Rahel "stoppited." At Sophie's funeral, a bat alights on a mourner: "the singing stopped for a 'Whatisit?' 'Whathappened?' and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping." At times it feels as though you've dropped into a faux Rushdie novel, with cartwheeling corpses and talking statues. Mostly, though, Roy's verbal exuberance is all her own, and it makes "The God of Small Things" a real pleasure. History's lessons may be bitter, but Roy serves them up fresh, pungent and delicious. April 24, 1997 Jennifer Howard's fiction has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and the Blue Moon Review. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html