Though she was born in Germany of Polish Jewish parents and has until now located her fiction in India, where she lived for many years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has always seemed, in temperament and practice, to be a British novelist of a very distinct kind. Such a novelist (usually, but not invariably, female) is notable for her ability to deal firmly with any amount of nonsense from her characters. She instantly sees through their little games, laughs at their pretensions and calls them to order when they step out of line. Their antics may sometimes surprise the reader but never their mistress. She is witty, often funny and nearly always a precisionist in style. Though she usually allows herself one or two pet characters in each book, she is not known for exceptional kindness to most of her creations, who, if female, are likely to be vain, demanding or self-deluding and, if male, pompous, weak or fecklessly eccentric. This novelist (who has far more individuality than my composite sketch can indicate) has appeared variously under the names of Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch and Barbara Pym.

Certainly Mrs. Jhabvala's "In Search of Love and Beauty" displays in abundance the wit and chilling accuracy of insight that I associate with the British type. A macabre comedy of impulsive, thwarted lives, it is her first work of fiction to enjoy—if that is the word—an American setting. Like its predecessor, "Heat and Dust" (the most complex and interesting of the Indian novels), it is more satisfying in its richly textured parts than in its larger design.

Uprootedness is the prevailing condition in the novel…. Leo is a successful guru—part Gurdjieff, part buffoon—who has made a career of ministering to the souls (and bodies) of emotionally uprooted women of all ages who "wanted to be known, to be found out and probed to the core of their being."…

Nonchronological in its organization, "In Search of Love and Beauty" is built upon an accumulation of small scenes depicting the intertwined lives of Leo and the members of his circle….

In the passage that provides the novel's title, the narrator says of … [one] of Leo's disciples that "all her life … she had been in search of love and beauty and, in the course of this quest, had recklessly entangled herself in one harmful relationship after another." In pursuit of such a theme, there is much scope for comedy. (p. 3)

[The narrator often gives] ironic commentary on the behavior of her characters. It is writing of this deftness that has frequently led reviewers of Mrs. Jhabvala's books to evoke the name of Jane Austen. While the comparison has some validity in reference to the earlier Indian comedies, it would be misleading if applied in any but a very limited way to "In Search of Love and Beauty." The wit, the verbal precision and the firm grip are there, all right, but the total impact is utterly different from that of Jane Austen's fiction. For one thing, the tone is much harsher. Although Jane Austen can be severe and even a bit heartless in her attitude toward some of her characters, she does not revel—as Mrs. Jhabvala occasionally seems to—in their discomfiture and degradation. An element of grotesque horror dominates the later section of "In Search of Love and Beauty," particularly those dealing with the senility of Regi, who at 84 is nursed by a soft young man from a dance studio where lonely, sleepless old women come night after night to dance until they begin to fail or lose their minds. Mrs. Jhabvala's comedy is embellished with grinning skulls.

Page by page, "In Search of Love and Beauty" provides an abundance of small, sharp pleasures. Mrs. Jhabvala renders a little world of emotional, greedy refugees with much shrewdness of insight and with expertly chosen detail. Her phrasing is often brilliant—for instance, her description of a four-poster bed as "heavy with primal scenes." But in its totality the novel invites a response of amused detachment. Neither the structure—with its scrambling of the time sequences and its avoidance of a compelling, on-going action—nor the tone permits any marked degree of identification with the characters or their destinies. Entertained and slightly repulsed, one watches from a safe distance as Mrs. Jhabvala's damaged creatures dance around the ludicrous monster of egotism in their midst. (p. 41)