A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry · 1995
Set during Indira Gandhi's Emergency (1975-77), Mistry's novel follows four people whose lives converge in a Bombay apartment. Its scope and moral weight rival Dickens. Almost unbearable and almost unbearably good. Readers describe it as "the book that broke me and made me a better person," which for once is not an exaggeration.
The case against
Mistry's thumb is on the scale, and the scale is misery: castration, amputation, suicide, every reversal crueler than the last, until the accumulation feels less like fate than authorial policy. Dickens gave his coincidences the occasional mercy. Mistry refuses, for six hundred pages, and you may finish feeling instructed in hopelessness rather than moved.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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