An Obedient Father - Softcover

Readers opening this first novel from Akhil Sharma find themselves face to face with a wildly unappealing main character. Ram Karan is a corrupt civil servant, chubby and self-hating. "I had been Mr. Gupta's moneyman for a little less than a year and was no good". Ram has no illusions about his failings: "My panic in negotiations was so apparent that even people who were eager to bribe me became resentful". Things at home aren't so hot either: Ram's wife has recently died, as has his son-in-law, and so his daughter, Anita, and granddaughter, Asha, have moved in with him. The first chapter of An Obedient Father is lugubrious and oily and awkward, like its narrator; then suddenly the whole thing breaks wide open. Drunk one night, Ram touches Asha with his penis. Anita walks in, and the family's secret is out all at once, like a just-freed, very angry cat: Ram forced Anita to have sex with him repeatedly when she was 12.

Sharma, a Delhi-born New York investment banker, has written a novel that is satisfyingly ambitious and full of really lovely imagery (tulips, for instance, are "heavy-hearted"). He squares Ram's downfall in the context of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. As India descends into political turmoil, Ram is made accountable for corruption both at work and at home. What gives the book its engine is its even-tempered handling of Ram himself: he is always complex, never a moral lesson or a villain. By the time Anita exacts her quietly devilish revenge, we feel neither glee nor pity, just sadness. Sharma doesn't have perfect control of his material--the transitions between personal and political can be abrupt, the tension between father and daughter unravels sloppily. Still, this is a new voice emerging with great subtlety and care. --Claire Dederer

"A cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived portrait of a corrupt man in a corrupt society."-Richard Eder, The New York Times

A stunning work that is both personal and political . . . perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote
The God of Small Things."-The Nation
The themes of crime and punishment that Sharma explores so tellingly make
the parallels with Dostoyevsky's masterpiece compelling and instructive. . . .
That this novel is a debut is an astonishment."-Dan Cryer, Newsday
A cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived portrait of a corrupt man
in a corrupt society."-Richard Eder, The New York Times
"Weaves the national into the personal without a trace of the didactic. What is more astonishing is his success in joining the amiably picaresque aspects of the corruption . . . with the ghastly evil of its underside. --Richard Eder

A moving, persuasive tragicomedy.

Stunning work.

Extraordinary.

A moving, persuasive tragicomedy. "

Stunning work. "

Extraordinary. "

An uncompromising novel, a portrait of a country ravaged by vendetta and graft.--Hilary Mantel