[Iyer is an English journalist and travel writer. In the following review, he contends that parts of A Suitable Boy are more satisfying than the whole and that the novel would have been stronger if it had been shorter.]

In the house of English letters, Indian writers have often admitted us to the kitchen, with its hot spices, odd condiments and strange terms; and to the bedroom, not only for its obvious seductions, but also for the wild dream-flights entertained there. The event-infused city, the superstitious village, the polymorphous forms of Indian films are all by now familiar parts of the Indian scenery. But what Vikram Seth has tried to do, in his quietly monumental new novel, is to usher India into the drawing-room, to make it seem as everyday and close to us as nineteenth-century St Petersburg, say, or Regency Bath. His is a novel of the parlour and the breakfast-table, and one that passes like a long morning, and afternoon and evening, with the family.

A Suitable Boy is, on the face of it, simply a tale of a "nice, quiet girl" called Lata, nineteen years old, living in northern India in 1950, and trying to find a husband. Meanwhile, around her, the world's largest democracy is preparing for the first General Election in its young history. At its heart a story of four intertwined families, and their universal anxieties and affections, the novel is also a portrait of India, three years after Partition, trying to find a suitable future for itself, and struggling to keep the customs that steady while shedding the ones that stultify. It is the story of the passing of an era, of the last strains of a rarefied world of ghazals and nawabs, and the first approaches of a new, industrial age; of how the elegant Rajput miniature, you might say, is being replaced by the news-photo.

The distinguishing feature of the novel, though, may simply be its uneventfulness, its surpassing dailiness, the way in which Seth catches a life-sized, human, unextraordinary India. He sets his book, after all, not during the tumult of Independence, but in the uncertain interregnum that came after. And his purpose seems to be to rescue the country from melodrama and exoticism, and to show that if Dickens, with his volubility and humour and affection, is one natural chronicler of India, Jane Austen is another. As in E.M. Forster (another obvious precedent), traumas pass between the lines, and death is something that happens off-stage. In that sense, A Suitable Boy could almost be said to be a novel about things not happening: when a drunken boy drives a car too fast late at night, he brakes before he hits a lamp-post or a child; when a boy is rejected by his beloved, he does not kill himself, but goes off to the country for a month; when a child is lost in a murderous riot, he is, somehow, found.

This benign refusal of block capitals is ideally suited to Seth's gentle pacing and to the admirable directness and lucidity of his prose. None the less, the sheer bulk of the book comes as a surprise. For Seth's has always seemed a light, an almost glancing sensibility; his seemed a kind of Noël Coward talent. Charm is his calling-card, and sunniness his forte; playfulness is a large part of his attraction (evident here, before one even begins, in a rhyming Table of Contents, and two contradictory epigraphs from Voltaire about the longueurs of long novels). His last book, of poems, was one of the slimmest of the year; this one promises to be the longest. The question it raises is what happens to light comedy when it is extended across half a million words. Can an epic be built on charm alone?

There are, increasingly, two strands of Indian fiction, that of compassionate realism (exemplified by R. K. Narayan and, recently, Rohinton Mistry), and that of pinwheeling invention (the mode of Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor and I. Allan Sealy). Seth firmly allies himself with the former, and he attempts here what might be regarded as a counter-Rushdie epic: relatively secluded and old-fashioned where Rushdie is determinedly topical and international, somewhat conservative in style and temper where Rushdie is wilfully radical (Seth writes a classic English prose, and the most tender and touching marriage of all in this book about marriages is an arranged one). Most of all, Seth is a peace-maker, where Rushdie is a belligerent, and there are those, of the Rushdie camp, who will find his openness—"It is best to be on good terms with everyone", thinks one character, early on—too mild-mannered.

For me, though, the singular appeal of A Suitable Boy lies in its fondness, and in its evocation of an unhurried, gossipy, small-talking India as teasing and warm as every family reunion I've ever attended. His is the charmed world of the privileged middle classes, as Indian as their love of P.G. Wodehouse and Charlie Chaplin, as Indian as their college productions of Twelfth Night and boating trips on Windermere. Scattering movie-ads, greeting-card jingles and excerpts from law books through his narrative, Seth catches something thoroughly and unmistakably Indian, in the soft spot for numbers, the riddles, the quips about "making hail while the sun shines". Here are absent-minded professors, bored beauties and feckless boys who say things like "Nothing I've ever done seems to have happened." Here too are Dickensian processions of repetitious lawyers, stutterers and eccentrics (and even a character consistently called Uriah).

Seth clearly loves his people, and he passes that love on to us. He shows them selfish, quarrelsome and idle, yet never without sympathy; indeed, much of the sweetness of the main plot comes from the fact that all three of Lata's shadow suitors are entirely engaging. Even a family that speaks largely in doggerel, composes poems to its dog Cuddles and keeps reminding one how lovably eccentric it is, becomes likeable. There is in all this an occasional trace of self-delight, and not every reader will find himself won over by the boyish witticisms ("Curiosity is a curious thing" and "No fait is ever accompli until it's accompli"), or the little jokes (characters called Dr Matthew Evans and Sir David Gower). But it must be said that the only ill-tempered character in the book is the one called Seth.

Seth makes of his affections, moreover, a central point; the one strain running through the long narrative is a determination to see India through particulars and people, and a complete rejection of those besetting Indian vices, pomposity and abstraction. (In one bravura passage, Seth throws off a host of sparkling generalities—India is like the Square, like the Trinity, like a Duality, like a Oneness, like a Zero—so as, in effect, to show that anything you might say about this huge and contradictory place is true, and meaningless.) And at every turn he shows us, in the Forsterian way, how individuals can go beyond the divisions created by institutions, and friendship can conquer communalism. Thus a Hindu crosses religious lines to befriend a Muslim, and later stabs him—for reasons that have nothing to do with their religions. At the same time, Seth is worldly enough to see how idealism can undermine the people it would try to help; to show how undoing an unjust system can mean undoing the innocent people who are beneficiaries; and to catch the heart of that age-old Indian riddle of compassion and corruption, that a man is damned if he tries to tamper with the law to save a renegade son, and damned if he does not.

Seth is at his finest in his portrayal of the people most unlike himself—like Muslims, say, or women. He evokes with great sensitivity the plight—and the strength—of women in the constricting space of a zenana, and in an age when a man may say, "I had six children and six daughters too." One of the book's most powerful scenes is an episode of sexual threat, seen from the woman's point of view. He writes of children, and dogs and parakeets, with an uncle's fondness.

By its end, in fact, the novel has found a place for almost every possible position: even that of the foreigner who finds Indians "face-flattering, back-biting, name-dropping, all-knowing, self-praising, power-worshipping …" (having lived half his life abroad, Seth can temper an insider's knowledge with an outsider's amusement). A Suitable Boy is, in its unobtrusive way, panoramic: it gives us Muslim festivals and Hindu ones, courtesans and court-rooms, villages and cities and towns. What he does not know, he has researched, and, with his economist's training, Seth shows us all the details of how a Czech shoe-factory in India works; with his position as the son of a High Court judge, he covers in commanding detail the debate about land ownership. He describes Nehru's coup against himself, and issues as current as Hindu temples in Muslim areas. And though these passages occasionally seem a little tacked on, to give the novel epic status, there is not a detail that I found unconvincing or false.

But is it worth the weight? In The Golden Gate, as Gore Vidal saw it, Seth wrote "the Great California Novel", and his new one (handicapped, for some readers, by the Rushdie-like £1 million in advances it has received) is clearly an attempt to write the Great Indian one. In The Golden Gate, he was so much at home in his Pushkin stanzas that he made one forget (and so forgive) his virtuosity; here, attempting a 1,400-page novel on his first go at prose fiction, that is not so clearly the case. Over the course of the novel, he gives us any number of analogies for the book we are reading: it is like the Ganges, with its "tributaries and distributaries", it is like a banyan tree, with its slowly exfoliating roots; it is like a musician's raag, starting slowly but picking up speed.

Every single page of A Suitable Boy is pleasant and readable and true; but the parts are better crafted, and so more satisfying, than the whole. At times, it almost feels as if Seth is following his story more than leading it, and I could not help but think of his alter ego Amit (an Oxford-educated poet, and son of a High Court judge, embarked on an enormous first novel) saying that the reason his book was so long was that it was "very undisciplined". In places, the book feels more like a serial than an epic, and it is not immediately evident that its some 1,400 pages make it four times better than it would have been at 350. Indeed, its central love-story is so compelling that I found myself thinking that inside that fat novel, a much stronger thin one was struggling to get out.

Its publishers have likened the book, with its spacious realism, to Tolstoy and George Eliot. For me, though, A Suitable Boy is closest to Tanizaki, in his Makioka Sisters. For it is, like the Japanese novel, at its heart an elegy as well as a comedy of manners, about a traditional society in a time of change, and about a leisurely world of graces giving way to a new, more democratic time. Like Tanizaki, Seth locates these changes in the woman's curtained world of rituals, and uses a rich family's search for a husband as a way of making history intimate and human. Like Tanizaki, he writes winningly of everything domestic, especially women and their children. And like Tanizaki, he has given us that unlikeliest of hybrids, a modest tour de force.