Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Conversations in Bloomsbury
- 3 Comrade Kirillov
- 4 ‘A Horse and Two Goats’
- 5 The Tale of an Indian Education
- 6 ‘Clip Joint’
- 7 Cultural and Political Allegory in Rich Like Us
- 8 Towards Redefining Boundaries
- 9 The Golden Gate and the Quest for Self-Realization
- 10 Journey to Ithaca An Epistle on the Fiction of the 1980s and 1990s
- 11 Cuckold in Indian English Fiction
- 12 Stephanians and Others
- Works Cited
- Index
9 - The Golden Gate and the Quest for Self-Realization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Conversations in Bloomsbury
- 3 Comrade Kirillov
- 4 ‘A Horse and Two Goats’
- 5 The Tale of an Indian Education
- 6 ‘Clip Joint’
- 7 Cultural and Political Allegory in Rich Like Us
- 8 Towards Redefining Boundaries
- 9 The Golden Gate and the Quest for Self-Realization
- 10 Journey to Ithaca An Epistle on the Fiction of the 1980s and 1990s
- 11 Cuckold in Indian English Fiction
- 12 Stephanians and Others
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
What Vikram Seth says of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin can be said with equal justification about his book The Golden Gate – ‘like champagne/Its effervescence stirs my brain’ (5.5). This wonderful artefact, ‘tour de force of tour de forces’ (John Hollander), ‘the Great California Novel’ (Gore Vidal on dust-jacket), ‘the perfect book of the 1980's’ (publisher's blurb)–in 594, fourteen-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter – is certainly, to use a phrase from The New York Times review, ‘a splendid achievement’ (quoted in Leslie, 4). Indeed, The Golden Gate has generally received high praise as a zesty, trendy, scintillating and warm portrayal of modern Californian life, ‘an up-to-date tale of San Francisco's “Yuppiedom'‘ (Ionnone, 54).
In this chapter I shall look at the early reception of the novel to argue that The Golden Gate, much more than these things, is a sort of enquiry into the meaning of life in the contemporary world; that it is, above all, a book about love, pacifism, tolerance and compassion. What emerges is not a celebration of Yuppiedom, but a severe critique and rejection of it. In short, I find the book anti-materialistic and, ultimately, ‘spiritual’ in the values that it propounds.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Another CanonIndian Texts and Traditions in English, pp. 101 - 113Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009