[In the following review, Kakutani praises Roy's keen observation of human nature.]

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy's dazzling first novel, begins as a sort of mystery story. What caused the boy named Estha to stop talking? What sent his twin sister, Rahel, into exile in the United States? Why did their beautiful mother, Ammu, end up dying alone in a grimy hotel room? What killed their English cousin, Sophie Mol? And why has a "whiff of scandal" involving sex and death come to surround their bourgeois family?

While such questions may sound crudely melodramatic, they provide the narrative architecture of a novel that turns out to be as subtle as it is powerful, a novel that is Faulknerian in its ambitious tackling of family and race and class, Dickensian in its sharp-eyed observation of society and character.

A screenwriter who grew up in Kerala, India, Ms. Roy creates a richly layered story of familial betrayal and thwarted romantic passion by cutting back and forth between time present and time past. Set in southern India against a backdrop of traditional religious and caste taboos, her story depicts the tragic confluence of events—both personal and political, private and public—that bring about the murder of an innocent man and the dissolution of a family.

Although Ms. Roy's musical, densely patterned prose combines with the mythic power of her tale to create the impression of magical realism (her work has already been compared in India to that of Gabriel García Márquez), the most fantastical events in God of Small Things are not the products of a fevered imagination; they are simply the byproducts of everyday passions. As one of her characters observes: "Anything's possible in human nature. Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."

Writing largely from the point of view of the twins, Estha and Rahel, Ms. Roy does a marvelous job of conjuring the anamolous world of childhood, its sense of privilege and frustration, its fragility, innocence and unsentimental wisdom. She shows us the twins' uncanny spiritual connection with each other and their longing for their mercurial mother's approval. Even at age 7, Estha is the reserved one, dignified in his Elvis pompadour and pointy beige shoes. Rahel is the curious one, wayward, ardent and solitary in her pride.

Through the twins' eyes, we are introduced to their relatives and neighbors in the small Indian community of Ayemenem. There's their mother, Ammu, a lonely, secretly rebellious woman who feels that her failed marriage to a drunkard has ruined her chances of happiness and flight. There's their uncle, Chacko, a former Rhodes scholar who has returned home from Oxford to run his mother's pickle factory. And there's their great-aunt, Baby Kochamma, a mean, petty behemoth of a woman whose unrequited love for a priest has permanently warped her life. We meet Comrade Pillai, a local politician willing to sacrifice people to principles ("the old omelette-and-eggs thing"). And we meet Velutha, the handsome son of a family of untouchables, a skilled carpenter whom the twins and their mother adore.

Ms. Roy gives us a richly pictorial sense of these characters' daily routines and habits, and she delineates their emotional lives with insight and panache, revealing the fatal confluence of jealousy, cruelty and naiveté that shapes their destinies forever. Dozens of small details pin her characters to the page and insinuate them into our minds: the family matriarch, Mammachi, blind behind her rhinestone studded glasses, playing the violin: Chacko, carefully building model planes of balsa and watching them crash into the town's lush green fields of rice and Rahel, her unruly pulled back into a ponytail, making mental foes of people she loves in an effort to quiet her fears.

The world these characters inhabit is made equally palpable to the reader. On the surface, it is a modern world of populist politics and entrepreneurial zeal, a world in which American cars are status symbols and workers' rights are a fashionable cause. At the same time, it is a world in which divorced women are looked upon with scorn and romances between members of the bourgeoisie and the so-called untouchable castes are considered an unthinkable sin. In Ayemenem there are rigid, unspoken rules, and as the twins learn, history "collects its dues from those who break its laws."

If Ms. Roy is sometimes overzealous in foreshadowing her characters' fate, resorting on occasion to darkly portentous clues, she proves remarkably adept at infusing her story with the inexorable momentum of tragedy. She writes near the beginning of the novel that in India, personal despair "could never be desperate enough," that "it was never important enough" because "worse things had happened" and "kept happening." Yet as rendered in this remarkable novel, the "relative smallness" of her characters' misfortunes remains both heartbreaking and indelible.