I once took a slow train—I think it even advertised itself as such—from Calcutta advertised to itself New Delhi. The engine and carriages seemed to meander across the scenery, as if to insist that the journey was as important and interesting as the destination. There were frequent stops, scheduled and unscheduled, and intersections with numerous branch lines. Time and conversation merged, aided by landscape and light and an anthology of scents and colors. There was a class and caste system on the train (V. S. Naipaul says that India is an unsubtle country in this respect—poor people are very thin and rich people are very fat), and the worn and rusted tracks along which the locomotive drew us had been laid down by the Raj. On such a train the hard-to-get Lata, heroine of A Suitable Boy, finds time to read Jane Austen's Emma.

Vikram Seth smilingly says that his new novel, which is about 200 pages longer than War and Peace, "will strain your purse and sprain your wrist." The sheer heft and price of the book may discourage some readers from hoisting themselves aboard for a voyage to such a distant horizon. Seth believes that his agent, Giles Gordon, might never have read the original if it hadn't arrived just as Gordon was starting two weeks in the hospital. Yet when publishers first set eyes on it, they started such an auction as has seldom been seen in the world of the novel.

Penguin put six editors onto the reading of the book and bid $360,000. The firm of John Murray offered more than its previous year's net profit. Finally, Anthony Cheetham, the recently resigned chief executive of Random Century and founder of the new firm Orion, clinched matters with nearly half a million dollars. Seth says that he stood under a fig tree in his agent's garden while the bidding rose, and thought, "Good heavens. My life is changing before my eyes."

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His editor, Nicholas Pearson, didn't eat or sleep for two days after becoming "obsessed by the manuscript." Within the space of a relatively few chapters, I realized that I too had purchased a ticket for the destination. I desired to find out if Mrs. Rupa Mehra, one of the great mamas of modern fiction, would get a satisfactory swain for her daughter. And I was developing a brotherly interest in a minor character—Malati, the green-eyed radical minx.

Most of all, though, I was borne along by the prose, which has a deceptive lightness and transparency to it. Toward the end, the character Amit Chatterji (who most resembles Seth himself) is giving a poetry reading in the fictional town of Brahmpur to a sweltering literary club—which at another point gathers to hear a talk entitled "Eliot: Whither?":

"Do you believe in the virtue of compression?" asked a determined academic lady.

"Well, yes," said Amit warily. The lady was rather fat.

"Why, then, is it rumoured that your forthcoming novel—to be set, I understand, in Bengal—is to be so long? More than a thousand pages!" she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.

Amit's response was perhaps crafted to forestall the question Seth has nonetheless been asked by scores of interviewers from Bombay to Manhattan:

"Oh, I don't know how it grew to be so long. . . . I'm very undisciplined. But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch."

"How about Proust?" asked a distracted-looking lady, who had begun knitting the moment the poems stopped.

How about Proust, indeed? How about Stendhal, Balzac, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dickens, and all the other literal and figurative milestone authors to whom Seth is being freely compared? The roman-fleuve may be the standard for which critics reach, but it's important to remember that the terrain in this case is India and that the fleuve in question is the Ganges—storied like the Mississippi, holy like the Nile, dirty like the Hudson, busy like the Thames, romantic and curvaceous like the Seine.

Seth's editor, Nicholas Pearson, didn't eat or sleep for two days after becoming "obsessed by the manuscript."

Questions of bulk apart, it's comparatively easy to state what the novel is "about." The Hindu family depends on properly arranged marriages in a society calibrated with agonizing care by shade, caste, income, and "background." (Seth notes the marriage ads in the towns of the Ganges basin like Brahmpur, where boys with "fair to wheatish" complexions are especially sought-after.) The mother of all widows, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, has been left to manage this selection process unaided in a man's world, and has a spirited daughter, Lata, of whom the universally acknowledged truth, to paraphrase the opening of Pride and Prejudice, is that she must be in want of a husband.

The action takes place in the early 1950s, very shortly after India has been simultaneously maimed by partition and thrust into independence. Lata's "choice" of suitor may be made from a more modern and heterogeneous shelf, but must be governed still by immemorial tradition. Looming over the nuptial contest are the grand questions of Hindu-Muslim fratricide, rural misery and superstition, and national identity in the postcolonial epoch.

Some at least of the breathless comment on the size of the book and the whopper of an advance—topped up generously in New York by $600,000 from HarperCollins, which has gotten a lot of hype for its money—derives from the journalistically convenient fact that Vikram Seth is so amazingly small. He's been estimated to stand no taller than about two dozen copies of his (for once one can say it) magnum opus. Just a suspicion over five feet, I'd say, with bones and limbs in proportion. Lunching with him in a restaurant in Covent Garden was like feasting with a very diminutive panther.

He actually did begin his writing career as a miniaturist. The poem "Guest," for instance, which startled New Delhi society with its candor about gay sex, is two stanzas of seven lines apiece. His translations of Chinese verse (Three Chinese Poets) are exquisite, orderly, and restrained. One could well conceive of him, in another, neighboring culture, quite at home among the bonsai and the haiku and the attempt to paint on grains of rice.

His first novel, The Golden Gate, was written in verse and lyricized the accumulation of small effects that go to make up the Bay Area mosaic. Gore Vidal, who gave the book a lift to fame by blurbing it as "the great Californian novel," told me, "It was such a relief that he hadn't tried the great American one. I think of Seth as an Augustan—as an Alexander Pope rather than as one of the Romantics, though perhaps with a suggestion of Byron."

Here might be the point to mention that "Seth" doesn't rhyme with "breath," but with "bate." You should be hearing "The Golden Gate, by Vikram Sate," when you see the book on a shelf—the first rhyme between title and author that I can call to mind since Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara. And Vidal has guessed right. The rhyme scheme of Golden Gate is an homage to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which was itself inspired, Seth told me, by a bad translation of Byron's Don Juan. "I was working too hard at Stanford [where he was employed by the university press] and went into a bookstore to browse. There were various Onegin editions, and after I found the Charles Johnston one I stopped comparing and started reading." And, not long after that, writing.

Seth becomes delicately animated when he talks about poetry, form, and literary ancestry. He was educated in Anglophile Indian schools before going to England and graduating from Oxford, but he has spent more time in America than in England, and much time in China, and now lives in New Delhi. He worked there for eight years on A Suitable Boy, the last three of these in some penury when the Golden Gate royalties ran out. And he seems impressively confident that he is onto a new synthesis. "Just remember that in 20 years or so the largest group of English-speakers will be Indians." It's a conversational feat merely to trace the layers of reference and crossreference which he employs and deploys. I asked him about his hero and model Pushkin being black; his reply:

"Actually, one-eighth black—what people used to call octoroon. I think he had an Ethiopian great-grandparent. He wrote a little work called The Negro of Peter the Great, and there's a stanza of Eugene Onegin about 'my Africa.' But, you see, you can't get his stanzaic form, which uses masculine and feminine endings, from the English tradition at all. It comes to us another way. Pushkin wrote a short play—10 pages or so—about Mozart and Salieri, and, of course, that's the basis of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus.'''

He dipped his tiny beak into a hot toddy after this series of knight's moves.

I came back as sturdily as I could, asking him whether anyone who puts down 12,000 words a day, as Seth claims to have done until his wrist succumbed to a repetitive-stress injury, could really be choosing all those words with Flaubertian angst and discrimination. He pondered for an instant. "Well, Flaubert's famous search for the mot juste was once described as the cork which, once pulled, opens the bottle. If I can get at the cork, I can get all the drops too."

But if he's a sort of medium, or a possessed writer of poetry and prose and poetry in prose, how could he bear to cut a thousand pages out? "Only five or six hundred pages really. And they weren't very good. Or even if they were good, they weren't useful." A cucumber-cool reply, you have to allow.

Those who aren't so keen on Seth's blockbuster say that it's more like Galsworthy than Tolstoy, a jolly giant of a saga with lots of characters and speaking parts but no darkness or depth and no real consciousness of evil and suffering. And some of those who are keen on it are also keen to use it as a good old-fashioned plain-English cosh with which to whack Salman Rushdie. There's a persistent rumor, circulated most recently by the London Times, which has it that Rushdie told Seth, "I hear you've written a soap opera." Third World magic realist sneers at honest-to-goodness classical prose. Seth wrote an indignant denial that Rushdie had said any such thing, which is in the slow process of catching up with the gossip.

"It's a novel of characters, not theses," says Seth, disavowing any grand stratagem or message. Yet the book does feature India as "more than a setting." And behind the rainbow cast of nutty professors. Brahmans, intriguing clans, Calcutta sahibs, and sinuous musicians, there is a knowledge of pain and fear. Never mind the scars of Middlemarch, there are the fresh gashes inflicted by partition, and a series of hurts and threats exchanged between Muslim and Hindu.

How does Vikram Seth feel about the latest ghastliness to roil his country—the leveling of the mosque in Ayodhya and the anti-Muslim pogrom in Bombay? "In a way it has made me feel more Hindu rather than less, by way of repudiating this pseudoHindu perversion. I don't normally involve myself, but on 30 January—that's the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's murder—I helped take out a front-page advertisement in The Times of India. It opened by saying, 'If you are a Hindu, read on,' and then said, 'Do you believe that the demolition of (the mosque in Ayodhya) restored Hindu pride...?' Those who signed affirming it was a disgrace—a shame on us—included many impeccable Hindu types and some senior military people."

Seth may not be a magic realist, but he is inescapably one of midnight's children. Perhaps partly for this reason, he's also often resented in his country of birth, where hien peasant rationalism can be written off as inauthentic, Westernized, and insipid. Early notices of A Suitable Boy in the Indian prints were distinctly condescending. "His pot-boiler of gold," meowed the reviewer in Sunday, leaving little doubt that some of the resentment had to do with Seth's stupendous advance. Tarun Tejpal, writing in India Today, abandoned all talk of formalism to indict the prose treatment as "straightforward, bland, the writing mundane."

Seth looked a touch hurt when I mentioned this, but riposted by saying, "Well, it's typical. The Irish authors always got their worst notices in Ireland because of hatred of success. And. of course, now I'm getting radiant profiles in the Indian press just because the book is such a hit in London."

At this point, I noticed something that had been too obvious to realize before. Though Seth was at Tonbridge School—the alma mater of E. M. Forster himself—and Corpus Christi. Oxford, and speaks and writes the most meticulous English, he intones it with a definite subcontinental inflection that is absent in Rushdie and Naipaul. In many ways, he remains true to his roots, living with his parents and largely eschewing material goods such as a car and a mortgage. He even disparages the vast artifact of his own book, which he patriotically insisted be typeset in New Delhi, but which he says is designed so that any one of its 19 self-contained sections can be cut out with a razor and carried for greater convenience in a side pocket.

An appeal to Indian customs and traditions and peculiarities will always weigh with him—thus, though he roundly condemns the fatwa against Rushdie, when the talk turns to the ban on Rushdie's book in India, he starts talking about how complicated everything is. "One can't reduce these things to free-speech captions," he observes slightly pleadingly, asking one to be mindful of the communal tinderbox which nevertheless ignited in spite of the censorship.

Seth has a sense of responsibility to his Indian homeland, all right, but he clearly needs more than just his roots. "That's why, when I left England, I went to California. In a word: sunlight. I needed the sunlight. I need sunlight and water," says this elfin boy gravely. "I like swimming with dolphins. Soon I'm going to Ireland, to County Kerry, where there's a dolphin I can swim with. It visits this little port, and if it's in the mood it—"

"Cruises the waterfront?" I say facetiously, at once apologizing for my flippancy. "No," he says, declining my apology. " 'Cruising' is exactly the right word." I feel overawed at having assisted at the birth of a mot juste.