The Complex
One starts to wonder: Where could all this possibly be going? Mahajan knows exactly where it’s going ... Magisterial ... His work has always woven a subversive, contemporary sensibility into a traditional, almost 19th-century approach to form and style.
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The challenge of basing a long novel on a villain appears to have bedeviled Mr. Mahajan. He refuses to characterize Laxman as a seductive antihero, perhaps on the moral grounds of not wanting to make such a man seem attractive. But he has also done little to humanize Laxman’s sins. The novel is narrated by Karishma’s embittered son Mohit decades after the events, and his attitude toward most of the family is cynical and contemptuous. In Mohit’s telling, Laxman seems merely grubby and small-minded. Karishma is so desperately lonely that she finds solace in his company, but no one else can stand him. Like a lot of the Chopras, I began to dread the prospect of his appearance. The dourness of The Complex is, I think, supposed to indicate the book’s serious intentions. It marks an extreme tonal departure from Mr. Mahajan’s previous novel ... Mahajan has disarmed himself of the use of irony for the The Complex, a lengthy and earnest family saga modeled on the Russian classics ... Mahajan is good on the freedoms and anxieties of expatriation, and there is intriguing material here...but ultimately it is overshadowed by the tawdry business with Laxman ... Works...by painstaking accretion—or rather, by erosion, recording in granular detail all the lies and violations that eat away at the Chopras’ respectable facade. Much of this is repetitive ... An anguished, intelligent study of ambition decoupled from principles, and of the complacency and fear that allows it to thrive. The breakdown of the Chopras serves as a microcosm for the decay of the state. I only wish the book had been a little more micro than it is.
Mahajan delivers a multigenerational saga as labyrinthine as the Chopras’ apartment building ... Mahajan is a quick-witted satirist, but as the novel’s comedy evaporates in this fetid atmosphere, rare moments of poignancy feel like drops of dew on a cactus ... It becomes clear that we’re in the throes of a grand social novel constructed with dazzlingly modern ingenuity ... Mahajan is exposing a culture of flattery, corruption, and nepotism. But the oil of despair gradually fills up the pages until we’re standing knee-deep in these people’s misery. And no matter how breezily Mahajan records their culpability or even how much they’re actively courting their own misery, it can still feel damned depressing. Only the effervescence of Mahajan’s prose keeps The Complex from sinking into the story’s gathering darkness.
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