Volume 34, Number 15 · October 8, 1987
Breaking the Spell
By Robert Towers
Three Continents
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Morrow, 384 pp., $18.95
Talkative Man
by R.K. Narayan
Viking/Elisabeth Sifton Books, 123 pp., $15.95
Just when one had Ruth Prawer Jhabvala fixed as a writer of clever novels of manners in the British mode but with an Indian setting, she produced Heat and Dust (1975), a work that was more acutely perceptive about the Anglo-Indian experience than any other novel (including those of Paul Scott) since A Passage to India. Then, with In Search of Love and Beauty (1983), she boldly and unexpectedly transferred her setting from India to America. But she brought with her an essentially Indian theme: the relationship of a circle of needy and demanding disciples to the authoritarian guru at their center. In this case, the guru figure is not an Indian but a charismatic Jewish refugee of the Thirties, Leo Kellerman, and his circle consists of well-to-do refugee women from Germany and Austria who feel bored and stranded in New York; years later, when he is seventy, he establishes an Academy of Potential Development, which attracts not only distraught women but youthful followers from the counterculture as well. Mrs. Jhabvala casts a very cold eye indeed upon most of these people, and her novel, while skillfully constructed and often amusing, is flawed, I think, by what seems to be a virulent dislike of—or contempt for—most of her characters.
Review, 2972 words
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