DATE: Sunday, August 17, 1997               TAG: 9708070758

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JULIE HALE 

                                            LENGTH:   81 lines

A FIRST NOVEL PROVES TO BE NO SMALL THING

THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

ARUNDHATI ROY

Random House. 321 pp. $23.

In June, The New Yorker devoted its biannual special fiction issue to Indian writing, as though a new literary genre had just emerged. The occasion was, in part, the approach of that country's golden anniversary as an independent nation. Of course, India has been producing great fiction for decades, but part of what the literary world is witnessing as the non-colony turns 50 is a changing of the guard among its established authors. Joining the formidable ranks of Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Salman Rushdie is a talented, younger generation of writers, among them Arundhati Roy, who makes an impressive debut with her novel, The God of Small Things.

Roy is 37 and lives in New Delhi. Before The God of Small Things, her work consisted of exactly two screenplays - difficult to believe considering how finely crafted and lavishly detailed her novel is.

It is also a celebration of language. There is plenty of wordplay, a la James Joyce, but what results is a fresh syntax that seems singular to Roy's book: a ``skyblue Plymouth with tailfins'' sports a ``chromebumpered sharksmile.'' And she packs her sentences with maximum sound: ``The moonlit river fell from his swimming arms like sleeves of silver.''

With imagery like this, Roy conjures a lush world for what is ultimately a bitter story. Set in Kottayam, India, The God of Small Things is complexly plotted, a non-linear narrative that works the way memory does - flashing back, returning to the present, taking the past to pieces to learn what lies at its heart. Esta and Rahel are the main characters, a brother-and-sister team of twins who, as children, were so close they ``thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us.''

As the novel opens, the pair is reunited after a separation of 23 years. Now 31 and divorced from her American husband, Rahel returns to Ayemenem House in Kottayam, where she and Esta were raised by their blind grandmother, Mammachi, their meddling great-aunt, Baby Kochamma, and their beautiful mother, Ammu. The family's livelihood had been Paradise Pickles and Preserves, a once flourishing company headed by Mammachi and her son, Chacko. But the family fortunes and Ayemenem House itself are much deteriorated when Rahel arrives.

She also finds an altered Esta, who has become steadfastly mute since boyhood when he and she were separated. Roy withholds the tragic cause of this separation until the novel's end, a masterful move that makes for a suspenseful narrative, and gives her room to examine the political and social dynamics of modern India - the forces that work to bring about the family's downfall.

While there is little joy left for the twins at their reunion, Roy flashes back to their childhood, when they were a happy and precocious duo, and Ammu acted as both their father and mother in the absence of her alcoholic husband. The main events of the novel occur when the twins are 7, during a visit from their young British cousin, Sophie Mol. A blue-eyed freckle-faced little sophisticate who sports bright yellow bell-bottoms, Sophie is the daughter of the twins' uncle, Chacko, and his English ex-wife, Margaret, and is much doted upon by the inhabitants of Ayemenem House.

Sophie provides one of many contrasts in the book between classes and cultures. The twins envy her ``First World panache.'' On the other end of the scale is Velutha, a handsome carpenter employed by Paradise Pickles. He is a kindhearted friend to the twins and, as the novel reveals, much more than a friend to their mother. He is also an untouchable. When Ammu dares to cross the social barriers that separate her from Velutha, life at Ayemenem House takes a violent turn, and the twins' world is altered forever.

Roy couches tragedy in the magical stuff of childhood. It is a fascinating mix. The young twins' discoveries of the world make for original, delightful fiction, and their relationship with Ammu - like much about the novel - is both bitter and sweet. Their India is plagued by social prejudice, violence and what Esta and Rahel term the ``Love Laws, laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.'' From the lowest untouchable to the twins' well-to-do ``family of Anglophiles,'' no one escapes this stratification of the human heart.

The God of Small Things is a rarity, a first novel that works on every level, teasing, testing and above all, revering language. Roy's gifts as a storyteller are prodigious, and her eye for detail is infallible. The God of Small Things may be her debut book, but Arundhati Roy writes like an old pro. MEMO: Julie Hale is a writer who lives in Norfolk.

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