[In the following review, the critic offers a largely laudatory assessment of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.]

Escaping the pressures of a family urging him to become somebody, a young man, fired from his postal-clerk job, climbs up a guava tree, stays there, shouts down platitudes to well-wishers and is proclaimed a guru—a situation his father eagerly exploits for its money-making potential. That's the gist of the simple plot in [Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,] Desai's vibrant, delightful debut novel, which soars above its overworn premise (a staple of Indian literature) largely because the author, 26-year-old daughter of novelist Anita Desai, is a masterful satirist of human foibles, vanities and self-delusions. Ensconced in his orchard bower, Sampath Chawla—who's not a charlatan, just a muddle-headed kid seeking a clearer perspective on life—has a welter of problems. His eccentric mother, obsessed with cooking porcupines and mongoose, seems half-mad; his headstrong sister Pinky, determined to elope with an ice-cream vendor, bites a spy from the Atheist Society who's trying to expose Sampath as a fraud; meanwhile, a horde of drunken monkeys call down the townspeople's wrath, threatening the serenity of Sampath's arboreal retreat. Although Desai doesn't fully exploit the comic possibilities inherent in these situations (the first third of the novel is terrific fun, but then it fizzles out), she is an impeccable stylist, full of deliriously amusing, irreverent observations on India's rampant religiosity, self-involved families, monumental inefficiencies, stiff relations between the sexes and life's toe-stubbing limitations.