Quarterlife book review: A powerful first novel about millennials and politics

Quarterlife examines the idea of India at a time of massive transition. (Photo by Keith Lobo via Pexels)

If the Indian general election of 2014 was a churning of the ocean, then Devika Rege’s debut novel Quarterlife is one of the treasures that has emerged from it. Apart from the shortest of biographical notes, stating that Pune is her birthplace, the reader will glean nothing of the author’s background. However, for once, even the publisher’s claim, that this is ‘The Literary Novel of the Year’, is an understatement.

HarperCollins; 420 pages, Rs 599.

Written in the tradition of the philosophical novel, Quarterlife examines the idea of India at a time of massive transition. Riding through the tumult is a well-chosen cast of characters, from diverse circumstances, who have the commonality of being millennials. Quarterlife mainly charts the individual journeys of the Agashe siblings, Naren and Rohit, with a third strand introduced by Amanda, an American visiting Mumbai in 2014, a time when Indian society is caught between two polarizing forces: the secular capitalism of the preceding Conclave Party and the religious-ideological capitalism of the incumbent Bharat Party.

A Golden Generation

It is the potential of the Bharat Party’s economic mandate that prompts Naren Agashe, a successful but disenchanted 31-year-old Wall Street financial consultant, to return to India after ‘his existence in America is like bread gone stale.’ Accompanying him is a former flat mate from university, Amanda, a girl from an old New England farming family who questions herself, ‘Is this all there is to life?’ The quest for a higher purpose brings her to a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-majority slum in Mumbai. Meanwhile, as the younger Agashe kid who has grown up in the shadow of a brilliant brother, 24-year-old Rohit – ‘he is smart, he is smooth, but he isn’t rigorous’ – is a film-maker with a start-up studio, a wide network of friends and a growing restlessness.

Besides returning to his solidly middle-class Chitpavan Brahmin parents, Naren’s homecoming is also to their newly acquired duplex apartment in Pali Hill – an investment made possible by the sale of ancestral property – a new job with an upgrade to an associate partnership, as well as to the changing Mumbai skyline of ‘the sea face rising in a hundred concrete phalluses.’ While Naren sets about chasing success in the corporate world, Rohit enters a relationship with Amanda, a development that elicits a comment from his brother: ‘For white women dating brown men, it’s all about the civilizing project.’

Indeed, influenced by Amanda, Rohit embarks on a road trip to rediscover his own cultural roots. He ends up befriending Omkar Khaire, a cinematographer who is ‘backward caste, class, everything’, and a member of the Bharat Brotherhood. Besides wanting to make a film on Maharashtra’s most prominent Hindu festival, Ganeshotsav, Omkar dreams of making a biopic about his own life, its struggle. This new friendship alienates Rohit from his own privileged upper-class city friends – Gyaan, a business partner, and Ifra, a Muslim – who see Omkar as ‘a political type that stands for everything they despise.’

Towards a Hazy Horizon

While stories assure us that everything has a beginning, a middle and an end, Quarterlife is that rare novel that dares to speak differently. The zeitgeist it depicts is one of confusion, anger, anxiety, uncertainty but it’s also about hope, idealism, ambition, aggression and a deep impulse to emerge on the right side of historical forces that no one seems to quite have the measure of.

This need to change with the times, while being unsure of the nature and trajectory of that change, introduces an intense, contemplative, occasionally melancholy, tone to the book. None of the characters, so beautifully etched out by the author, is really driving the trends or creating the opportunities they hope to take advantage of. None of them lacks agency, but in a time of great and irresistible change, even the relatively privileged find themselves unsure of how far their education, book and street-smarts, as well as family connections will carry them in the new India. This ambiguity about how to read the present is what connects a varied cast of characters, both major and minor, who otherwise have very different life experiences.

Ambitious this novel certainly is, but its boldness is backed by Rege’s unmistakable commitment to storytelling and her sheer talent for it. A quiet confidence permeates each page as she builds for the many characters a range of milieus. For Amanda, Bombay’s slums are ‘the convoluted bowels on which the white domes and glass towers of the world rise, and everything of beauty she knows turns wan, the way a pretty girl’s paleness becomes evident when you hear her gut is rotten.’ For Rohit: ‘When he thinks of Bombay, all that comes to mind are the colonial buildings, American brands and Bollywood stereotypes of India that estranged him from what he hoped to find here.’ For Ifra, whose family stayed back during Partition out of love for Bombay, ‘the Bombayite is living on borrowed time. She sighs for the sepia city to which no passport can carry her.’

A trait that all the novel’s characters share is the ability to talk. In the middle of the book there is a nearly 25-page long drawing room conversation, with all the main players participating. It draws the reader in so completely that they may well be sitting among them. In fact, this is one of the exceptional pleasures of reading Quarterlife: its quiet intimacy. The reader is always in the story, watching what’s going on, feeling, thinking and reminiscing. Politics pervades the story, yet it would be a mistake to consider this book merely a political novel. It reminds us that no matter how well or strongly we articulate ourselves, we are all creatures with contradictions.

Quarterlife by Devika Rege is published by HarperCollins India; 420 pages, Rs 599.