The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ★★★☆☆

The prose is Roy at her best. The novel around it isn't.

Roy's sentences here can stop you cold. She writes that the traffic inside one character's head had "stopped believing in traffic lights," producing "a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock." That's the kind of line only she writes, precise and strange and completely her own. At the level of the sentence, nobody touches her.

The problem is everything above the sentence level. This reads less like a novel and more like a collection of essays about India's domestic politics, dressed in fictional clothing. Roy has sharp, well-informed opinions on Kashmir, on Hindu nationalism, on caste, on the widening gap between India's rich and poor, and those opinions come through clearly and forcefully. One passage nails the anxious social contract of a diverse, violent country: "As long as the center holds, as long as the yolk doesn't run, we'll be fine." That's a genuinely great political observation. It would be a phenomenal line in a long-form essay. Here, it's competing with plot for space, and the plot keeps losing.

That's the real issue. There are clearly two or three separate books tangled together in this one, any of which could have been extraordinary on its own. Instead they're all fighting for room in a single novel, and none of them gets to fully breathe. You can feel the years of work behind it, and you can also feel the pressure to finally deliver a second novel after such a long gap. The book reads like it was assembled from material Roy had been sitting on rather than built from a single clear structure.

I'd read any of the individual threads as their own book gladly. As one novel, it's too much and somehow, still, not quite enough. Roy at the sentence level remains one of the best prose stylists writing today. I just wish the architecture around the sentences had matched them..

• Format: 465 pages, Kindle Edition
• Published: June 6, 2017 by Knopf
• ISBN: 9781524733162 (ISBN10: 1524733164)
• ASIN: B01NBZXMTT
• Language: English

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent, from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city, to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war.

The engine of Roy's story is a hijra (India's third gender) named Anjum, and the story begins with her unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. Anjum's charisma draws a vibrant assemblage of outcasts to join her--other hijras, Kashmiri freedom fighters, activists, orphans, low-caste Hindus and Muslims, and a host of animals. Anjum's home is a place where the formerly unwanted embrace each other's true selves.

We encounter the odd, unforgettable Tilo and the men who loved her, including Musa, sweetheart and ex-sweetheart, lover and ex-lover. Their fates are as entwined as their arms used to be and always will be. We meet Tilo’s landlord, a former suitor, now an intelligence officer posted to Kabul, and then we meet the two Miss Jebeens. The first is a child born in Srinagar and buried in its overcrowded Martyrs’ Graveyard. The second is found at midnight, abandoned on a concrete sidewalk in the heart of New Delhi.

As this ravishing, deeply humane novel braids these lives together, it reinvents what a novel can do and can be. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness demonstrates on every page Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts.

Notable Highlights

The saffron men sheathed their swords, laid down their tridents and returned meekly to their working lives, answering bells, obeying orders, beating their wives and biding their time until their next bloody outing. [loc. 989]

Fiercely competitive TV channels covered the story of the breaking city as “Breaking News.” Nobody pointed out the irony. They unleashed their untrained, but excellent-looking, young reporters, who spread across the city like a rash, asking urgent, empty questions; they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless. [loc. 1435]

And people (who counted as people) said to one another, “You don’t have to go abroad for shopping any more. Imported things are available here now. See, like Bombay is our New York, Delhi is our Washington and Kashmir is our Switzerland. It’s like really like saala fantastic yaar.” [loc. 1444]

Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labors and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist—continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the center holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view. [loc. 2153]

She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, traveling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them. [loc. 3046]

The sullen city was wide awake but feigning sleep. Empty streets, closed markets, shuttered shops and locked houses slid past the jeep’s slit windows—“death windows,” local people called them, because what peered out of them were either soldiers’ guns or informers’ eyes. [loc. 3287]

She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock. [loc. 3314]

Kashmir was one of the few places in the world where a fair-skinned people had been ruled by a darker-skinned one. That inversion imbued appalling slurs with a kind of righteousness. [loc. 4513]

He referred to himself as Jannat Express. And if he was speaking English (which usually meant he was drunk), he translated that as Paradise Express. One of his legendary lines was: Dekho mian, mein Bharat Sarkar ka lund hoon, aur mera kaam hai chodna. [loc. 4795]

Harried doctors and nurses picked their way through the chaos. It was like a wartime ward. Except that in Delhi there was no war other than the usual one—the war of the rich against the poor. [loc. 5632]

The stupidification of the mainland was picking up speed at an unprecedented rate, and it didn’t even need a military occupation. [loc. 5648]