Cover image of "Selection Day," a disappointing book by an Indian novelist

Aravind Adiga entered the literary world with a splash in 2008 when he won the Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger. Although I frequently find Booker Prize-winning books to be unreadable, I picked up The White Tiger, anyway. My interest in India trumped my hesitation about the self-important “literary” Booker jurors. Imagine my surprise when the novel enthralled me. I found it insightful, timely, and occasionally hilarious. (I read the book two years before I began writing reviews, so no review appears here.)

That experience with The White Tiger led me to pick up Adiga’s second novel, Between the Assassinations. Structured as a collection of fourteen interconnected stories set in a small town on India’s west coast, Between the Assassinations was very different from his debut effort. Like so many second novels that arrive after a hugely successful debut, it didn’t measure up to The White Tiger. Still, I enjoyed the book. I found it a fascinating look from the inside out of India’s caste and class system.

By contrast, Selection Day, Adiga’s fourth novel, is a disappointment—for three reasons.


Selection Day by Aravind Adiga ★★★☆☆


First, it’s all about cricket. The book teems with cricket terms that are nowhere explained. (There’s a glossary in the back of the book, but it’s sketchy and obviously an afterthought, probably included at the insistence of the publisher.) It’s boring to read sentence after sentence that makes no sense.

In any case, the contrary views of my British friends and the author notwithstanding, the game of cricket itself is boring. Over the centuries, the game has acquired such a massive collection of rules that no one can possibly understand them all. For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone would put up with that. Admittedly, in fairness, I also find baseball and American football to be boring. But at least the rules are reasonably transparent. (Well, more or less reasonably so.)

Second, though I’m a fan of English-language novels written by Indians, Indian-Americans, or in this case an Indo-Australian, I can usually navigate through the occasional word in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, or one of the other of India’s hundreds of languages. Adiga uses far too many in Selection Day. I frequently found myself baffled, since many terms weren’t clear in context.

Third, I got the impression that Adiga has come to take himself too seriously. Maybe that Booker Prize went to his head. Apparently, he wrote the book to prove he could write “literature.” At times in Selection Day—too many times, for my taste—his meaning was impenetrable even when written in plain English. Take this sentence for example: “A son’s true opinion of his parents is written on the back of his teeth.” Excuse me? (Yes, I grabbed that sentence out of context. But it still stopped me in my tracks.)

Selection Day spans a fourteen-year period. It begins three years before the day when seventeen-year-old Mumbai cricket players audition for a place on a prestigious citywide team and ends eleven years after the day. The story centers around two brothers, Radha and Manju Kumar. They live with their father in a hovel in one of Mumbai’s endless slums. Both are extremely promising cricket players forced since infancy by their brutal father to conform to his rigorous, unorthodox, and undoubtedly insane methods to train for stardom in the game.

Other key characters are a third boy, a Muslim, unlike the Kumar brothers; an aging cricket scout who writes an embarrassingly self-congratulatory column for a leading Mumbai newspaper; and a wealthy Mumbai businessman recruited by the scout to sponsor the two boys in exchange for a third of all their future earnings from cricket.

Enough said. If you follow cricket, you might enjoy this novel. I have my doubts, though.

Some time ago, I read Aravind Adiga’s superb, Booker Award-winning novel, The White Tiger, which won the UK’s prestigious Man Booker Prize. More recently, I’ve reviewed three other novels by the same author:

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