In truth, Small Things has an easily summarized plot. The setting is an inland town in India's southern state of Kerala in 1969, not so much sultry as dripping with decay, disappointment, family pettiness and social calcification. A visitor ends up dead, and Ammu's affair leads to tragedy. The god of small things, i.e. social propriety, is the novel's victor. The deity of love and happiness loses out in the end.
Small Things is a novella padded out with dank atmospherics.
Its action takes place over two weeks, its main drama in a single night. But aside from a present-day framing device, Roy has kept most of her story for the last 88 of the novel's 340 pages. The bulk of the book is a lengthy setup, infused with endless, cinematic fast-forwards that telegraph the tragedy ahead. Every setting is described as a future site of woe, including the abandoned estate where the Light in August-inspired climax takes place. Roy and her brother grew up with those family tensions, although her mother took the opposite path from Ammu, successfully contesting inheritance laws that denied daughters a share of family property.