If American novels were reviewed like South Asian lit:

… I came to Sacred Games with a mind not merely wide open but full of anticipation. In part this was because of my admiration for two novels of immense length also set in India — Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children– in part because of similar feelings about Shashi Tharoor’s tidier novel about the Indian film industry, Show Business, in part because of lingering affection for E.M. Forster’s superb A Passage to India. [Link - thanks, PK]

I came to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with an open mind partly because of my admiration for two novels also set in America — Tom Sawyer and Catcher in the Rye – partly because of similar feelings about The Da Vinci Code, partly because of lingering affection for Catch-22. These Americans really know how to write spicy prose, and all their books are written exactly the same way.

Chandra, a native of New Delhi who now lives in India and California, knows his mother country well… [Link]

Foer, a Brooklyn resident, knows his country well. I’m sure of this because I’ve seen America on TV, and he nails it.

That’s the main preoccupation of the novel, at least in its final three or four hundred pages, but zillions of other stories and characters clamor for the reader’s attention… [Link]

The trouble with Extremely Loud, like War and Peace, is that it’s just got too much stuff in it.

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