Are You Experienced?

Nowadays, Steppenwolf evokes images of fuel-injected Telecasters and hippies on Harleys, and Siddhartha sounds like the name of the maniacal guitarist of the Sex Pistols. But back in the ‘60s, Hermann Hesse’s novels rode in the backpacks of a generation of dharma bums who booked passage to India on quests for something more substantial than the perfect beach. “Siddhartha,” in particular, was the bildungsroman par excellence for the long-haired brahmins of ‘68, searching for enlightenment in a country in which debauchery and denial were equally available.

Samar, the Brahmin hero of Pankaj Mishra’s first novel, “The Romantics,” was born a year later, in 1969. Fresh from university, Samar arrives in the holy city of Benares, site of the “immemorial Hindu belief that to die in Benares was to be released from the cycle of rebirths.” Samar’s aim, however, is somewhat less concrete than death. At 20, Samar finds himself entirely freed from the attachments of family--his mother is long dead and his father has retreated in old age to an ashram in Pondicherry--and committed only to the nebulous world of books. The days find him wandering the library of Benares Hindu University: “browsing through the long row of shelves in the badly lit stacks, where students smoked foul-smelling beedis; the fly-infested rough wooden tea stall just outside the main gate, where I would eat, standing up, a hasty lunch of omelette and sticky-sweet tea; the view from my windowside desk of the patch of sunlight carpeting a lawn, the dewy grass ablaze but the neem trees bordering it luxuriantly dark and still,” reading Flaubert and Edmund Wilson, surrounded by other young men, more or less slouching toward a Civil Service exam few of them will pass.

But Samar has something these other young hostel-dwelling students lack: a rooftop room with a view of the Ganges, “the thick mists rising from the river and shrouding the city in gray, the once-hectic bathing ghats now desolate, the sad-sweet old film songs from an unseen transistor radio in the neighborhood reaching me weakened and diffused.” More important, Samar shares his rooftop with an eccentric English spinster, Miss West. The once beautiful Miss West has spent the better part of her life in India, in love with a married Englishman who occasionally dashes into the country for a romantic interlude with her. The majority of the time, she surrounds herself with multicultural misfits: paunchy Americans still basking in the Indian afterglow of ‘60s mysticism, young girls making the grand Buddhist tour and rich Eurotrash hiding from home and ennui.

The Maharanee of the latter is Catherine, the statuesque daughter of a leading Parisian banker. “It was hard not to be distracted by Catherine’s extraordinary beauty,” says Samar when he first meets her at a soiree chez Miss West. “Miss West had said, ‘She’s very pretty.’ I was struck then by this way of looking at women. ‘Pretty’: it wasn’t a word much used for women in the world I had known. . . . Women were obedient daughters, dutiful wives, and devoted mothers.” Pretty or not, Catherine is the girlfriend of another Indian boy, Anand, a sitar player whom she hopes to bring back to Paris and set up as the successor to Ravi Shankar. Samar finds himself revolving as a literary third wheel to the couple, entertaining Catherine with discussions of Schopenhauer and Turgenev while Anand plays and plucks. With the campus simmering over a fire of student unrest, the lives of Catherine and Anand take up an increasingly large portion of Samar’s time. Until one day Catherine invites him to escape Benares and accompany her (she needs a sanity break from Anand and his sitar) up to Miss West’s mountain bungalow near the source of the Ganges.

Mishra, who lives in New Delhi and in Simla and whose essays have appeared in this country in The New York Review of Books, writes simply but very well of India. Samar moves from the library of the Benares Hindu University with its “criminalish young men playing cards, the bored young women with long, painted fingernails, tracing their initials on the wooden desktop,” up to the cool pines of the Himalayas, where he and Catherine fall in love in “a forest bungalow, with wooden lattices in the verandah and a small patch of lawn, now covered with snow.”

What Mishra writes less well are his people, particularly his French heroine and his hapless hero. Samar is reduced to monosyllabity throughout much of the book, with the occasional repetition to add a pinch of emotion. “ ‘Yes,’ I said,” he responds to an invitation to a boat ride. “ ‘Yes.’ ” It is a trope he has evidently picked up from Catherine. “ ‘We’ll write each other and then one day we’ll meet. Soon,’ she said, and then added with extra emphasis, ‘Very soon.’ ”

The effect is overwhelmingly distancing. Samar falls in love with Catherine, but we have to take his word for it. His heart beats with such a faint pulse, his blood pumps at such a slow rate that the greatest surprise of the book is the very fact of a climax. Catherine may be the only French blond in Benares, but she is a self-centered bore nonetheless, slumming among the brown people without much more desire than to epater les bourgeois. As an object of desire, she emits an attraction so obscure that one waits in anticipation for our young Brahmin’s wheel of life to turn toward a more worthy target. But this is it. Catherine is it, the great love of Samar’s life.

“The Romantics” has the air of the inexperienced, a novel written by one who has not loved women less but has loved books more, especially ones from which he could borrow cliched responses and creaky devices. As a result, much of the dialogue of “The Romantics” seems cadged directly from the English phrase books that populate the plays of Ionesco. Here, however, they are rendered sans irony, leaving characters that are less Absurd than absurd, less enlightened than simply lite.