A Family of 900 Million : A SUITABLE BOY, <i> By Vikram Seth (HarperCollins: $30; 1,349 pp.)</i>

It is no wonder that when Vikram Seth finished writing the rather simple story of Mrs. Rupa Mehra’s search for a suitable boy to marry her lovely young daughter, Lata, he had produced a novel over 1,300 pages long. The author, you see, left nothing out.

He chose to tell the whole story, producing for all time the whole world of Lata Mehra, with all the intermingled levels of North Indian culture, including entangled and intertwined families, a plethora of castes and religions, levels of education, and political and economic aspirations. And sex and violence, as well as poetry and puns and jokes.

In a land of 900 million people, Seth seems to be saying, no one person can possibly be singled out: Their connections must be taken into account as well.

And yet, this is not a bloated text. In fact, it is spare. In a magnificent display of artistic control as well as compassion for his reader, Vikram Seth disappears. And in an odd way, so too does his writing. It is absolutely seamless. There are no impediments placed between the reader and the story and the intimate lives of the characters. The reader’s immersion in Indian life is so complete that by the time “A Suitable Boy” comes to its successful conclusion, aspects of Indian life that seem exotic--like the idea of arranging a marriage for a daughter--make perfect sense to a Western reader.

The tale takes place in a mythical city, Brahmpur, capital of a mythical state, Purva Pradesh, in the very real Northern India of the early 1950s. Of the many events that play through the text, one is the general election of newly independent India in 1951. Another is the struggle to push through the state assembly a bill that would strip feudal landlords of their holdings. Seth takes the fallout of such momentous change right down to the village level.

“A Suitable Boy” begins with the marriage of Pran Kapoor to Lata Mehra’s older sister, Savita. The basic cast of characters the reader will follow through a year of politics, religious strife, love affairs, suicides, attempted murders, debauchery, courtship, festivals, strikes, Shakespeare productions, horse races, cricket matches, human stampedes, births and deaths all pretty much appear at this first wedding: Mehras, Kapoors, Chatterjis and Khans. The author is kind enough to provide family trees at the front of the book, but the story is so clearly told the reader will rarely refer to them.

Make no mistake about it: This is a book about India and Indians. The first white men, a couple of British twits, appear at about page 400; they make some silly, ignorant remarks about the local culture, then quickly disappear. The next white men appear somewhere around page 1,000. They are Czech overseers at a shoe factory. They, too, disappear. And by the time they do, the reader can describe the making of shoes from the tanning of the hides through the final polishing of the brogues. The level of relevant detail Seth weaves through his text--whether numbers theory or political machination or academic maneuvering or farming or classical musicianship or natural history or cultural anthropology--is astonishing for the way it comforts the reader and draws him in closer and closer to the many characters at hand.

If Seth consciously worked from models or with a literary strategy, he settled on the great, sweeping novels of the 19th Century. Tolstoy comes to mind without too much prodding (though Seth never succumbs to lecturing his readers). The 19th Century masters may well have had grand literary aspirations in mind when they set to work, and no doubt Vikram Seth did as well. But they also wrote to entertain, to fill an evening, to offer an informed distraction at the end of the day. And so does Vikram Seth.

His struggle, however, is far greater than Tolstoy’s or George Eliot’s, for he writes against the impact of television and film, those modern doses of spoon-fed entertainment that make few demands as they quickly come and go. Seth writes against a reader’s busy life and reduced attention span. Like “Middlemarch,” though, “A Suitable Boy” is a page-turner, and the page-turning must go on night after night. I found myself getting edgy as the evenings wore on, hoping dinner guests would leave earlier than normal so I could get down to reading. I left dishes in the sink until morning so I could get back to reading; put off the writing of letters and the paying of bills so I could get back to reading. To close the door, pull down the shade, slip between the sheets and balance this weighty tome against my knees became the driving force of my days.

In time I found myself talking back to this book, as though it were alive. I found myself laughing through pages. And very much to my surprise, I found myself reading through tears at the death of an important though rather minor character, if the weight of characters can be measured in quantities of ink.

I also found myself more frightened in fewer measured words than I ever thought possible at the scene in which Lata suddenly comprehends the incestuous relationship between a relative and his daughter. She faces the evil alone, unprotected, and it is an absolutely chilling two or three pages.

“A Suitable Boy” is a book that pays readers back, and richly, for their nightly effort.