[Anita Desai's] work is known for its texture and for its ability to place us solidly within any scene, however foreign. She constructs her plots with infinite care, relying less upon physical events than upon a mosaic of details, thoughtfully selected and arranged.

In "Clear Light of Day," she describes the airless, stagnant, dreamlike lives of a decaying family in post-partition India; and she draws us into these lives by giving her story an unusual shape. Appropriately, this is a book without apparent movement. It hangs suspended, like the family itself, while memories replay themselves and ancient joys and sorrows lazily float past.

Its outward plot is the visit of Tara, an Indian woman now living abroad, to her family's house in Old Delhi. Both of her parents are dead, and her older brother lives in another city. Only a sister and younger brother remain at home. Bim, the sister, is a history professor—a strong, brisk, competent woman. Baba is utterly withdrawn. (p. 1)

It's evident that Tara leads a bustling life outside India, but once she settles in she becomes the person she was as a girl—someone weighted down by lassitude and indecision and the heavy summer heat. The old patterns reassert themselves: visits to neighbors, visits from neighbors, aimless walks through the rose garden. She and her sister compare their memories, which sometimes agree and sometimes differ. What emerges is a picture of a family so curiously removed from their lives that even death is just a slightly more noticeable absence. (pp. 1, 45)

Why does all this work so beautifully? What keeps us turning the pages of a story that appears to be going nowhere?

First of all, Anita Desai is unexcelled at conveying an atmosphere. Whether it's the atmosphere of a parched, dying garden, or a languid evening lawn concert, or the endless summer mornings of idle children, we are fully there; the mood of the place is thick around us.

And in "Clear Light of Day," it is particularly the atmosphere of deterioration that she conveys—so vividly, in fact, that the deterioration takes on a kind of motion all its own. There's a feeling of depth, of multiple layers, in her description of the cobwebbed gate of a deserted house, the river drying to a muddy trickle, the rotting fruit picked over by birds, the blackened water of the well where a cow drowned long ago….

This should be depressing, but instead it's oddly exhilarating. The effect is one of richness and mystery. At times, it's even funny….

But above all else, what keeps us reading is the invisible motion—first, the journey downward as the sisters sink into the past; and second, the interior journey that Bim undertakes as Tara's visit lengthens. For this is really Bim's book, as it turns out. Bim is the only character whose life has not yet crystallized. Gradually, she travels from calm to irritation, and then to bitterness, and then to the deepest despair. She begins to reconsider her role in the household…. She catalogues all her old grievances against [the family]…. And at last, in a single, wonderful passage, she comes to a full realization of her family's value to her.

Anita Desai has created an entire little civilization here from a fistful of memories, from a patchwork of sickroom dreams and childhood games and fairy tales. "Clear Light of Day" does what only the very best novels can do: It totally submerges us. It takes us so deeply into another world that we almost fear we won't be able to climb out again. (p. 45)