For a long time it has seemed that novels from India write their own blurbs: poised, witty, delicate, sparkling.

What this fiction has been missing is a different kind of ambition, something just a little coarse, a hunger to swallow India whole and spit it out. It needed a touch of Saul Bellow's Augie March brashness, Bombay rather than Chicago born and going at things in its own special Bombay way. Now, in "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie has realized that ambition. (p. 1)

As a growing-up novel with allegorical dimensions, it will remind readers of "Augie March" and maybe of Gunter Grass's "The Tin Drum," Laurence Sterne's "Tristam Shandy," and Céline's "Death on the Installment Plan" as well as the less portentous portions of V. S. Naipaul. But it would be a disservice to Salman Rushdie's very original genius to dwell on literary analogues and ancestors. This is a book to accept on its own terms, and an author to welcome into world company. (pp. 1, 18)

As a Bombay book, which is to say, a big-city book, "Midnight's Children" is coarse, knowing, comfortable with Indian pop culture and, above all, aggressive. Salman Rushdie assumes that the differences between Colaba and Chembur are as important, and can be made as interesting, as the differences between Brooklyn and The Bronx…. Much of the dialogue (the best parts) reads like the hip vulgarity—yaar!—of the Hindi film magazine. The desiccated syllables of T. S. Eliot, so strong an influence upon other Anglo-Indian writers, are gone. "Midnight's Children" sounds like a continent finding its voice….

Of course there are a few false notes. There is a shorter, purer novel locked inside this shaggy monster. A different author might have teased it out, a different editor might have insisted upon it. I'm glad they didn't. There are moments when the effects are strained, particularly in the early chapters, when an ancient Kashmiri boatman begins sounding like "The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man." On a more serious level, Mr. Rushdie at first has a difficult time endowing the villains of Indian politics with mythic stature …; petty household intrigues seem more momentous than the misaffairs of state…. But with Ayub Khan, the Bangladesh war, "The Widow" and her son, the later pages darken quite handsomely. The flow of the book is toward the integration of a dozen strongly developed narratives, and in ways that are marvelous to behold, integration is achieved. The myriad personalities of Saleem, imposed by the time, place and circumstance of his extraordinary birth …, are reduced to a single, eloquent, ordinary soul. The flow of the book rushes to its conclusion in counterpointed harmony: myths intact, history accounted for, and a remarkable character fully alive. (p. 19)