Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Roy, Arundhati - John Updike (review date 23 June 1997)

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John Updike (review date 23 June 1997)

SOURCE: "Mother Tongues," in The New Yorker, June 23 & 30, 1997, pp. 156-59.

[Updike is an American novelist, critic, essayist, and short story writer. In the following review, he lauds Roy's achievements in The God of Small Things despite what he considers her "overwrought" passages and self-conscious "artiness."]

The spread of English throughout the world, via commerce and colonialism and now popular culture, has spawned any number of fluent outriggers capable of contributing to English literature. Some, like most Australians and Americans, write English with no thought of an alternative; others, like certain inhabitants of the Caribbean, Ireland, Anglophone Africa, and India, write it against a background of native tongues or patois that are abandoned or suppressed in the creative effort—an effort that to a degree enlists them in a foreign if not enemy camp, that of the colonizer. The...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism
   1. Publishers Weekly (review date 3 March 1997)
   2. Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 March 1997)
   3. Alice Truax (review date 25 May 1997)
   4. Laura Shapiro (review date 26 May 1997)
   5. Richard Eder (review date 1 June 1997)
   6. Michiko Kakutani (review date 3 June 1997)
   7. John Updike (review date 23 June 1997)
   8. Amanda Craig (review date 27 June 1997)
   9. Amitava Kumar (review date 29 September 1997)
   10. Sarah Lyall (article date 15 October 1997)
3. Copyright

1. John Updike