The Golden Gate

"Yes, I read it at that time and I was a bit sniffy too because I felt it had a very middle-class view of India. Then I reread it during the Pandemic, and I realized that I had misunderstood it and that it was totally making fun of the Indian middle class, and I found it hysterically funny. But it didn’t surprise me as The Golden Gate did and it didn’t touch me as much. The Golden Gate is written in verse and it’s beautiful verse but that’s not why I chose it. I chose it for two important reasons. First, it was the first book that I read, written by an Indian, that wasn’t about India or Indian people. It’s about San Francisco and Americans. Secondly, it was a deeply empathetic book and for me personally, I love writers who show empathy for their characters and don’t make fun of them but give them dignity. I think it is human nature when confronted by something very different — and America must have been very different for Vikram Seth when he got to Stanford after England and India — to want to ridicule it so that what is alien and different becomes less threatening. But Vikram Seth didn’t do that. He wrote about the loneliness of Americans and the fragility of relationships in a city like San Fransisco with great sympathy and understanding. Too many non-Western writers get stuck in an ‘ethnic’ trap. Look at Vikram Seth. He wrote The Golden Gate . What does he do next? He writes a novel about India, A Suitable Boy, which makes him famous. Whereas for me, I thought his really great achievement is the way that he writes about the world. Writers and books are universal, they belong to everyone. I love to read not to learn about other cultures, but to feel what it means to be human. When I read Vikram Seth I feel very human, not Indian. For me, I read Vikram Seth the way I read Marquez or anyone else. Because he speaks about the truths of the human heart. It’s about a group of young people post-college, dealing with loneliness, living, and finding love. John and Phil are college friends. Phil and Ed are lovers but not openly. Jan, the artist, is a free spirit. She is both friend and sometime lover of John who still needs life to fall into categories. While he is attracted to her, he also finds her too much to handle. It’s a book about friendship and love, and how these two are so complicated and difficult to untangle. It’s not a remarkable story, but it’s a universal story of people in their twenties and early thirties. It captures that period of life when you are free and adult but freedom can feel very heavy and frightening, that moment when you are still innocent and vulnerable, open to the world and quite alone as well. You’re also trying to discover yourself and who you are. It’s a kind of fuzzy moment, when you’re anything and everything and nothing at the same time. It’s a very confusing moment. Seth captures that confusion and a certain loneliness of the soul which is why we search for love, beautifully. That is the genius of the book – its universality. When I read it I was 15 and in a little boarding school in the Himalayas. My father gave me the book and told me I should read it. I had no idea that men could love men. And here was this Indian writing about San Francisco and complicated things like sexuality in a totally familiar way. He made me empathize with Phil and John and Jan, I felt like I knew them. My first novel Smell was set in Nairobi, Kenya, and in France. In my collection of novellas , though most of the stories are about India, I have one story, “The Cook,” which is about a Swiss cook set around Lake Annecy. I have set two books in Tokyo, Japan — My Beautiful Shadow , about a married woman who is a shopping addict among other things, and The Hidden Forest, which has yet to come out. At present, I am working on something that takes place in Beijing. These are all places I have lived in and where I speak the language (rather badly but enough to be able to understand other people’s conversations). When I married my diplomat husband and we moved to Tokyo I asked myself – could I still be a writer? And if so, what kind of a writer? It is very difficult to write about a culture that is not your own, even if you have been living there for some years. But it’s important to make that attempt because the whole point is that reading novels creates empathy with people who are very different from you. Judge a book and an author on how well or badly the book creates this empathy in you, but don’t condemn it for trying. While it may be a challenge to be empathetic towards someone who is very different from you, I think it’s one of the most important things in life, and the more we try for empathy with those who are different, the more we suspend judgement, the more we learn what it is to be truly human. Or you have a different perspective, let’s put it that way. The point is that, in the end, you’re not going to just read Vikram Seth, you’re probably going to read lots of other books about San Francisco . Then you have this way of being able to compare. You learn one thing from one book and another thing from another book, and that’s great. In the end, these are stories about people and it’s lovely to be able to get to know the people who live in far-off places, though what’s far now? Google has us all mapped and under surveillance. He is clearly brilliant. I believe he is also a calligrapher. He wrote From Heaven Lake which is a gorgeous book. It’s a travelogue about Xinjiang and Tibet ."

"The Golden Gate is modeled on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin . A novel in iambic pentameter might sound like an overly intellectual bore, but it’s far from it. It’s rife with pathos and acute observations about the yuppies that began descending on the Bay Area in the 1980s. And it has a real story that pulls you in as the verse pulls you along. The sonnet form allows Seth to turn on a dime from one character to another. From techie to lawyer to artist, he includes the whole modern cast of characters. You marvel at how he does it. There is not a wasted word, and his wit shines through the whole time."