RUN AND HIDE

An intense, probing novel examines rampant materialism and spiritual bankruptcy.

Reprising concerns that informed several previous books, Mishra examines the consequences of capitalism, globalization, and the violence of greed on communities, families, and individuals. The narrator is Arun, who tells the story of his life and those of his friends Aseem and Virendra to Alia, a young writer aiming to expose the “Hollow Men” who have emerged from the so-called rise of the New India. Yearning to escape the squalor and humiliating caste system that marked their youth, the three, through dogged efforts, are accepted as students in a technical institute which, they believe, will launch them into a better future. “To be modern,” Aseem often repeats, “is to trample on the past; it is to take charge, to decide being something rather than nothing, active rather than passive, a decision-maker rather than a drifter.” Seduced by “fantasies of power,” money, and sex, Aseem and Virenda reinvent themselves: In New York, Virenda becomes a billionaire. Aseem, failing as a writer of literary fiction—like Naipaul, whom he venerates as “the prototype of the early twenty-first-century globalised man”—instead finds celebrity “as an environmental activist, cultural impresario and intellectual entrepreneur of the Global South.” Awash in money, he hobnobs with the international glitterati. Arun, meanwhile, beset by “a kind of guilt at wanting too much from the world,” retreats to a Himalayan village where he works as a translator. Yet he, too, is lured to the West, following Alia. Through Arun’s observations of educated, well-heeled liberals—Westerners and Westernized Indians—Mishra underscores the hypocrisy and pretentiousness of their overstressed “political and ideological commitments”; the behavior that Arun tries to emulate in “a series of impersonations—believable performances, with hardly any slips and fluffs, as an upper-caste Hindu”; and the painful trampling of his past.

An astute, discomfiting journey into a wasteland.