COLLISION COURSE

In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.

Epluribus unum might be the proper political aspiration for a large and multifarious country, but when it comes to the novel people tend to applaud something closer to the opposite. The novel gets idealized as a liberal agora, a meeting place of competing voices, the space for a special kind of evenhanded “dialogism.” Joseph Brodsky praised Dostoyevsky for his ability to play devil’s advocate against his own Christian faith: religious readers, making their way through Dostoyevsky’s many-voiced f iction, might not become atheists, Brodsky said, but they finish his novels uttering “the creed’s dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.” Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was defended on similar grounds in 1989, after receiving its terminal review by the Ayatollah Khomeini. “Ours is an age of competitive languages,” the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes wrote, ten days after the fatwa was issued. “The novel is the privileged arena where language in conflict can meet.”

This is true of Dostoyevsky, and true, also, of the Rushdie of “The Satanic Verses.” But it’s an idea mainly honored in the breach. Most contemporary novels are too narrow to allow for the truly dialogical: autofiction is a bedroom rather than an arena. Ours is an age of crazily competitive languages, yet, paradoxically, this renders us politically squeamish. For who enjoys being yelled at? Even novelists whose lenses are turned outward seem to lose their nerve when it comes to the risky art of extending the principle of charity, of endowing one’s political opponents with presumptive reason and comprehended motive. Not so the Indian writer Devika Rege, whose first novel, “Quarterlife” (Liveright), is a fearless achievement in multifarious listening.