[In the following review, Aldama outlines the plot of Fasting, Feasting, suggesting that the change of settings for the novel' s conclusion compromises the integrity of the narrative.]

Anita Desai's novels typically gravitate around women (mostly middle-class South Asians) who come of age in the sweltering clime of India's outback and within households heavy with patriarchal oppression. In her new novel, Fasting, Feasting, the protagonist Uma, much like Desai's earlier characters Nanda Kaul in Fire on the Mountain (1977) and Bimla in Clear Light of Day (1980), dares to dream of a life beyond her estate's closed gates. Unfortunately, also like her predecessors, Uma finds that her desires—“A career. Leaving home. Living alone”—meet with unscalable walls at every turn.

Deep in the Gangetic plains, Uma grows up with her younger brother Arun and sister Aruna. Through a series of coming-of-age snapshots, Uma comes into focus. We watch, for example, as she is forced to drop out of Catholic school so as to better serve her brother and father. When Uma grows up, we see her filled with angst as “MamaPapa” (her father's tyrannical personality envelops her mother's) try to pimp her out to a variety of well-to-do men. Superannuated Papa, fond of his white cricket fatigues and “whiskey and water,” requires a good marriage to keep up the family's upper-middle-class image. After a local photographer airbrushes a photograph of Uma, giving her “pink cheeks and almost-blue eyes,” she is forced to meet a coterie of seemingly wealthy, over-the-hill men. The arranged encounters, however, all end disastrously. One groom-to-be runs off with Uma's dowry, investing it in a real-estate scam; and when Uma finally does marry, she discovers that her new husband, Harish, is already married. Like the other rogues, he was only out to get her money.

All along, the last thing Uma desires is a man. She is familiar with the fate of her beautiful cousin Anamika, who, even after winning a scholarship to Oxford, was married off to an old curmudgeon. After several years of turmoil living with a jealous mother-in-law, Anamika douses herself in kerosene, sets herself on fire, and throws herself off a balcony. This is not the fate Uma wishes for. Rather, she hungers for a world without men and seeks companionship with other women, like her widowed aunt, Mira-masi. Mira-masi seems to be an appropriate role model for Uma; she too is an outsider. Her grand holy pilgrimages, Hindu chants, and frequent ashram sojourns make her the family outcast. However, like other socially different female role models Uma looks to, Mira-masi turns out to be so self-centered that she ultimately fails to give Uma the attention she thirsts for.

Anita Desai's lyrical yet pointed prose powerfully draws the portrait of a woman who can never blossom into her own in such an arid social landscape. Unfortunately, Desai's sudden shift in the last chapters from Uma's Gangetic plains to her brother Arun's experiences in suburban Boston takes away from an otherwise heartfelt, sobering story. In Boston, Desai haphazardly sketches encounters with an ineffectual cardboard cutout, taciturn Mr. Patton, a weight-obsessed, nagging Mrs. Patton, and a bulimic daughter, Melanie. Perhaps a little more complex fleshing-out of Uma would have proved a more subtle and effective way to infuse the story with human breadth and universal appeal.

Still, in spite of the novel's half-baked denouement, Fasting, Feasting remains an exquisitely told, powerfully tragic story of the Umas, and the Melanies, of the world who are born gasping for air in a gender-imbalanced social order.