Amitabha Bagchi’s Above Average
I’ve generally stayed away from the recent spate of ‘IIT’ books, having winced through a chapter or two of Chetan Bhagat, but Bagchi’s book came well recommended, plus a book about an opera-loving rock-crazed teenager growing up in Mayur Vihar in the 90’s comes (literally) too close to home to be ignored.
Calling Above Average a novel, is, to me, something of a misnomer. It’s more like a collection of modestly well written vignettes loosely cobbled together into a book. The overall effect is of spending an afternoon with an old friend listening to him reminisce about the good old days. A few of this friend’s war stories are genuinely entertaining, but most have only the value of nostalgia, and you listen to them politely, because, well, the person telling them is such a nice guy.
Two things make this book enjoyable. The first is the sincerity of Bagchi’s writing, its quiet simplicity. Bagchi has considerable talent for bringing conversations to life, but on the whole he’s not a particularly astonishing prose writer. What makes the book a pleasant read is that Bagchi seems to recognize this, and doesn’t try to push the limits. It would have been easy to be too clever or too dramatic in writing this book, but it’s a trap that Bagchi successfully avoids. And because he does the book has a certain basic authenticity, a sense of genuineness, of fundamental honesty. It’s a quality that’s rare enough to be worth admiring.
It’s also a quality that makes it possible for the reader to identify with the book’s narrator, which is the second pleasure that the book affords. There’s something insidiously appealing about reading a book that reflects so much of your own life experience, especially when that experience is so competently described. The book works, I think, because its nostalgia comes clothed in the familiar, so that in reading it we get access to our own memories, our own past. This sense of identification is presumably strongest for those who went to the IITs (though not having been to one I can only speculate) but I think anyone who went to college in Delhi in the mid to late 90s will find something in the book to relate to.
My biggest frustration with the book lies with Bagchi’s development (or lack of development) of its narrator. This narrator – one Arindam / Rindu – is the proper centre of the book. Given that the episodes in the book are connected loosely, if at all, it falls to the narrator to hold them together, to provide, in his own person, the essential gravity of the novel. Yet it is precisely here that Bagchi’s honesty fails him. For a book manifestly about the coming of age of a certain generation, Above Average is unbelievably reticent about its central protagonist. We learn a lot about Rindu’s friends and the people he interacts with, but he himself remains sketchy and elusive. The book tells us, for instance, almost nothing about his family or his relations with them. Rindu’s interests are mentioned and implied, but barely developed – we get one fleeting reference to opera, and his entire interest in literature and writing (surely a huge part of his life) gets summarily dealt with in a couple of pages. The same thing happens with Rindu’s decision to join academia, and his one significant romantic relationship remains virtually unexplored as well. You almost get the sense that Rindu is telling you these long elaborate stories about other people to keep from talking about himself. So reluctant is Bagchi to provide any emotional access to Rindu, that the narrator remains a blank, shadowy figure, impossible to really invest in. This is a shame, because it gives the book a weightless, unanchored quality, and because the few times we are allowed into Rindu’s feelings are among the most powerful in the book. If Bagchi had shared more of Rindu with us, this would have been a better book.
It would also have been a better book if Bagchi had spent more time on the everyday. As it is the book reads like a collection of episodes with much of what goes on in between edited out. Bagchi does give us the occasional glimpse of what ordinary life was like for Rindu and his friends, but these pieces seem haphazardly thrown in and they are too few of them. What the book hints at but doesn’t quite deliver is a tangible feel for the experience of being at an IIT, a real sense of the context in which its action takes place. This is not, by itself, a criticism – the act of writing is necessarily about selection and Bagchi is free to focus only on key incidents – but I can’t help feeling that a richer description of the more mundane world of the IITs is exactly what Bagchi’s talent seems best suited to. For me, the value of the book even as it stands lies not so much in the plot development (such as it is) but in an almost anthropological exploration of a particular time and place, and I can only wish that Bagchi had developed that more fully.
Overall then, Above Average is a book I’m underwhelmed by. It has its moments, and is a pleasant and mildly entertaining read, but I can’t help feeling that the two and a half hours I spent reading it could have been better employed chatting with an old college batchmate.
May 23, 2007 at 4:32 am
I can’t help feeling that the two and a half hours I spent reading it could have been better employed chatting with an old college batchmate.
I see your point, but generally speaking I always figured you’d rather spend time with a book than with a friend. No?
May 23, 2007 at 8:02 am
J’wock: Yes, absolutely. Which is why the fact that I’d rather spend time with a friend is a criticism of the book.
May 24, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Dear Falstaff,
Thanks for your well considered and thoughtful review of my book.
You mentioned that anyone who went to college in the 1990s in Delhi would be able to relate to the book and later you talk about the book as anthropological exploration of a particular time and a particular place. Do you think the book makes sense to people who do not have a way of relating to the time and place?
Often when we look at the classics or at fiction produced in other parts of the world we try to think about in terms of some notions of universality. At times in tension with particularity, but universality nonetheless. I’d be interested to hear your view on how the book does on this front.
Thanks again for thinking about the book.
Best,
Amitabha
May 26, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Amitabha,
It’s a hard question – largely because it’s difficult for me to comment on how the book might seem by someone who I’m not.
That said, I don’t think (and wasn’t trying to suggest) that it’s a question of the book ‘making sense’ to people who can’t relate to the time and place. I think the themes you work on – friendship, ambition, the struggle to find your own place in the world – are universal enough to make the book accessible to the general reader. To me the question is more whether readers who don’t relate to the context will find the book interesting. As I say above, much of what I enjoyed about the book was that it reminded me of so much in my own life. I’m not sure how successful the book will be where that experience of nostalgia isn’t replicated. On the whole, I suspect people who don’t relate to the time and place may still find the book interesting, but perhaps in a more clinical way (and this is the point about it being almost anthropological) as an intriguing and well written insight into the experiences / ideas of a generation they don’t otherwise understand / relate to.
The closest parallel I can think of is to Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. I know people – most of them first generation Americans of Indian / Bengali origin – who swear by The Namesake and get their friends to read it as being an accurate account of the immigrant experience in the US. I, on the other hand, found The Namesake somewhat dull, mostly, I suspect, because I didn’t relate to it at all. What Lahiri was saying made sense to me, I just didn’t find it particularly engaging. I can’t help wondering if the response of people who don’t relate to the time and place of your book might be similar. Obviously, I might be entirely wrong about this, and readers from other contexts may find the book fascinating (fyi, my mother read it and it seemed to enjoy it)
I think part of my disappointment with Above Average is that it raises themes that are both interesting and universal, but its development of these themes, absent context, isn’t particularly engaging. I find this frustrating because I see considerable potential – both in the idea and in your writing – that I feel never gets fully exploited.
For instance, there’s a point in the book where you write: “It was Neeraj who taught me that friendship between two men can have all the ferocity of a love affair. Of the many things I was forced to realize in reflecting on the time I spent with him, perhaps the most sobering and terrifying was the understanding that the strongest and deepest bonds we form in our lives are with people who know how to hurt us in the most devastating ways.”
I think this is fascinating, and you could write a whole book about it. But the description of the friendship between Rindu and Neeraj that follows doesn’t really deliver on the promise of these lines. Their friendship comes and goes too quickly – we barely get to see what its steady state looks like, Rindu’s emotions about it stay largely hidden (we know how he feels about it, but it doesn’t seem to affect him very much at the time) – there are a few brilliant scenes in there, but I didn’t come away with the sense of anything as life-altering and emotionally overwhelming as a love affair. I would have liked to see a much longer, much deeper development of the friendship between the two – that would have made it a more emotionally rewarding book, as well as making it more of a contribution to a theme that is decidedly universal. Have you read Hesse’s Demian? Or for that matter, Narziss und Goldmund? They’re what that opening paragraph made me think of.
At any rate, congratulations on being published and best of luck for the next book. I look forward to reading it.
Falstaff
June 29, 2007 at 6:31 pm
An excellent review and a sharp, cogent and illuminating reply to Amitabha’s question. Just one question: how do you find the time?
July 25, 2007 at 7:07 am
I could relate to Above Average as anyone who shares similar time and space would – No obsessive nostalgia but often a smirk on knowing some one quite like those in the book. It was fun but the book could have delivered more. I asked my friends from another time-space dimesion to read this book and they have enjoyed it though not entirely since cetain idioms were very very local.
At the end, I would wait for his next book.