They need to. A good novel doesn't just sketch an individual. It paints a world. Its central characters aren't Hindu but Eastern Orthodox, when they aren't Marxist. The country's timeless beauty is soiled by World Bank-financed catastrophes.
Western investors run Indian theme park resorts for monied tourists.
Roy's protagonist, a woman who comes home after finding no gold at the end of America's rainbow, moves forward and backward in time, from the present to terrible events of the late '60s. The writing is as vivid as a subtropical forest, tangled sometimes with wordy underbrush. Joseph Skibell, playwright and fiction writer in residence at the University of Wisconsin, is descended from Holocaust survivors. Only children and drunks can see him, and his rabbi, who proffers advice in the form of a talking raven. With his hard, spare prose and magical, grotesque imagery, Skibell pleads not for vengeance but for remembrance.