Publishers Weekly
09/02/2024
Rege debuts with an intelligent if overlong meditation on the rise of Indian nationalism in 2014. Naren Agashe, a thriving Wall Street consultant, returns home to Mumbai after eight years in the U.S., despite having recently secured a green card. He believes the future lies in India, thanks to promises from the Hindu nationalist Bharat Party to end corruption and deliver jobs. Accompanying Naren is a college acquaintance, Amanda, who’s set to teach in a Muslim-majority slum. In Mumbai, Amanda becomes involved in a “situationship” with Naren’s younger brother, Rohit, a charming filmmaker. As Amanda contends with culture shock and India’s income inequity, she’s bothered by Rohit’s inability to acknowledge his privilege. Then Rohit befriends Omkar, a Bharat supporter, and despite disapproval from many of his friends, he agrees to produce Omkar’s film on Ganeshotsav, a festival notorious for sparking tension and violence between Hindus and Muslims. Rege gamely tackles India’s caste system and the elites’ blasé response to the rising threat to minorities under the Bharat Party, though her tendency to deliver ideas via lengthy dialogue can make the characters feel wooden. Still, she pulls off some beautiful and kaleidoscopic set pieces, such as her depiction of Ganeshotsav. Readers will want to keep an eye out for what Rege does next. Agent: Maria Cardona Serra, Aevitas Creative Management. (Sept.)
Debutiful - Adam
"A bonafide stunner. Rege’s plot and characters are outstanding. The novel starts in a smaller scope than one might expect but then blossoms into a grand view of India, politics, and friendship. Her grasp on how to keep a reader hooked is evident throughout the novel."
Tanuj Solanki
"A landmark novel. ... Rege has a vast descriptive repertoire, is willing to take astonishing risks with structure, and is immaculate in her numerous interiority dives. Her hand is so sure, it’s often impossible to believe that Quarterlife is a debut."
Maureen McLane
"Dazzling, sophisticated, and wholly achieved in its ambition ... Devika Rege is a transformative novelist."
Vauhini Vara
"What a blazingly original voice, what a fiercely intelligent engagement with contemporary world politics and culture. Devika Rege is at the forefront of a new generation of authors who are challenging received notions of what transnational literature can do and remaking global literary culture in the process."
Literary Hub
"Quarterlife promises to be an essential read for this moment in history."
Anuradha Marwah
"An exploration of the relationship of the self with the nation in the fashion of the big novels of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh. . . [Rege’s] biggest achievement is her fidelity to her object of exploration and her refusal to make aesthetic concessions in its representation. She resists the fictionalist’s urge to simplify. . ."
Swati Daftuar
"What’s especially exciting is the freshness in Rege’s turn of phrase—the rhythm in her sentences feels new, and marks the arrival of a voice we have not heard before in Indian literature in English."
Kirkus Reviews
2024-07-04
An ambitious, unusual, formally risky novel that attempts nothing less than a full-scale portrait of India circa 2014.
The book begins with three principals: Naren, a hard-charging management consultant who, in the opening scene, decides to leave the U.S. and return home to an India undergoing both rapid development and a surge of Hindu nationalism; Amanda, Naren’s white American college friend, who (in part to extricate herself from a romance that’s soured) accepts a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-majority slum; and Naren’s younger brother, Rohit, a filmmaker with whom Amanda gets involved. About a quarter of the way through, it opens out into something odder and more ambitious, incorporating many more characters, a more panoptic view of India on the cusp of becoming a world power. The book’s nearest American analogue is probably Tom Wolfe and his “social x-ray” novels: sprawling, multivocal, rococo in style, bristling at every seam with big ideas. The good news is that Rege is a talented young writer, finely attuned to the psychology of her characters. The less good news: Despite some compelling characterization (for example, Kedar, Rohit and Naren’s cousin, a reckless journalistic firebrand, and Omkar, an angry young nationalist filmmaker), the novel can feel chaotic—there are so many people that no one feels quite fully inhabited, and the book flits quickly on to the next. (Wolfe called his method “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” and here Rege ups the number of feet to three billion or so.) The characters can sometimes feel, too, like types or mouthpieces, a suspicion that’s encouraged by Rege’s decision, at the end, to introduce the first-person voice of the novelist. Overstuffed, yes, occasionally bewildering, yes—but a lot of that reflects, persuasively, the author’s sense of India’s exciting, fractious, sometimes dangerous profusion of factions and energies.
A promising first outing by a skilled writer.
