Thick Skin is an interview series featuring authors talking about negative reviews, from critics and (anonymous) readers alike

See all of the Thick Skin installments.

Episode XXVII: “If he resents the hype, so do I”

Published 2/20/23
In this installment, I speak with Deepti Kapoor about her Times review, mischaracterizations, the Western gaze, pulling excerpts, The Godfather comparisons & more.

Today I'm talking with Deepti Kapoor, whose excellent new novel, Age of Vice (Riverhead), became an instant New York Times bestseller. A sweeping tale of money, crime, and love, it has been lauded as "a luxe thriller" (The New York Times), "dazzling" (The Washington Post), and "India’s answer to The Godfather" (The Guardian).

But today we're going to be discussing those reviews that were less generous, both by critics and everyday readers. Before we get started, I'd like to know: Do you read all of your reviews? And do you, against all reason, scour reviews on sites like Goodreads and Amazon?

I do not read all my reviews. I read some around publication time, I skim them with my eyes half-closed, I get a general sense, I hear whether they were okay or not secondhand, and then slowly when I get the general sense of a reception, I stop looking altogether. Pre-publication I was interested in Goodreads, until every single person in the publishing and wider entertainment industry said, "Do not look at Goodreads!" Since publication I'm generally aware of the rating, which I have to say right off is something I find abhorrent for all books and art in general, like seriously, we're in a world where we read a book and then give it a rating out of five? And then, being a hypocrite, if I want to make myself feel good, I go and look at the five-star reviews only. And even those give an idea of the massive issues some people have with this book.

We'll get to those reviews on Goodreads in a bit, and perhaps give you some exposure therapy to the non-five-star reviews, but first I wanted to talk about your reviews from critics.

I like the idea of reading with your eyes half-closed, and wonder how that works in practice. Unless a review is a total rave or a total pan you have to take the good with the bad, and often your impression of a review can shift depending on which sentence you’ve last read. And, unfortunately, psychology usually has it that the bad lines stay in the memory a lot longer than the good. For example, Kirkus' review of your book—one of the first an author gets—which is generally positive, says the book is "a bit too long," and then, two sentences later, "a bit too long-winded." (No comment here on the repetition.) Had you read this review, and did these two stings wash away the general positivity?

I'm aware of the Kirkus review. I didn't read it. I was sent it and opened it and my eye first fell on a line that said something like "a whole lot of fun" and I shut the laptop and said fuck that, if that's what you take from the novel then I'm disregarding the entire review. And that kind of reminded me that reviews aren't really for the author and it's useless looking at them. And this is a point I want to expand on perhaps: not only aren't the majority of reviews useful for authors, they aren't necessarily useful for readers either, or at least this reader; I generally don't find value in a review that says, "I don't like this, I like this", as if it's a review of a vacuum cleaner. The only reviews that are useful—and this applies to cinema, music, art—are ones that discuss the ideas raised in the piece of art. This idea of a good review or a bad review is just kind of empty to me. But back to the question, no, those particular criticisms, if you can even call them that—a bit too long, a bit too long winded—are utterly meaningless to me. In the immortal words of The Dude, "that's just like, your opinion, man."

Being too long and too long-winded does especially seem to be in the eye of the beholder—and thus easy to slough off. But I want to move now to your Times review, by Dwight Garner, which contained deeper cuts at the novel, starting with, "[Kapoor] does not offer, except rarely, the pleasures of subtlety. Over more than 500 pages, the book’s sleekness bends toward slickness and the magic toward tricks. Its length really hurts it. What might have been a crisp and moody entertainment, in Graham Greene’s elevated sense of that word, distends."

Garner then writes that you "also [do] not offer, except rarely again, the pleasures of interiority. The hot bodies (everyone is gorgeous), the status details, the ambushes, the crunching fight scenes that make the characters resemble video-game avatars, the 'shattering' revelations — it all piles up."

Two paragraphs later he notes that "mentally I checked out around page 75."

Do you also wield the magic words of The Dude to fend off this criticism? Have you read the Times review?

Oh yeah, I read this one. The publishing people were more disappointed than I was because it's The New York Times (what you guys call The Times), but I'd already expected it to be something like this, so it wasn't a surprise. I certainly wasn't waiting for a rave (and as a child of Goa my idea of a rave is something very different). I had the distinct impression that he was reviewing the hype as much as anything, and if he resents the hype, so do I, so at least we're on the same page there. But quite honestly I don't exactly recognise the novel he's reviewing, so it was more of a bemused head scratcher, and if we break down the quotes, yeah, the Dude abides, mostly, especially when it comes to "the pleasures of subtlety" and "the pleasures of interiority." You know, the novel is maximalist, it's Indian. We have a different standard mode of operation, loud and colourful, and the subtleties of behaviour and intent are hidden within that overt brashness. Similarly, what we say and do don't necessarily equate to what we mean. So on the matter of interiority, I'd argue that it's purposely written in a style that eschews standard novelistic interiority, working with visuals and surface action in order to replicate an Indian mode of communication. I'd also say that Ajay is a character who doesn't have access to a rich interior life, mostly because he's a marginalised Indian who hasn't been granted one. Or more specifically, what he has inside, he can't communicate in words, so we work with him on the surface. I'd also say on one level: “guilty as charged.” It's neither subtle nor interior, but since it didn't pretend to be, so what? I guess I don't really know what Mr. Garner wanted, but whatever he wanted I didn't provide. Fair enough. If he wanted a quiet little novel dripping with atmospherics all I can say is that I wrote one of those already and it barely paid for six month's rent. Regarding one of his other lines, it amused me that he read “hot bodies (everyone is gorgeous).” I was like, really?! There are only two briefly intimate scenes as far as I remember, one of which is really melancholy. Sunny is perceived as handsome by the novel's inhabitants because of his wealth and power, and later on he's overweight and grotesque. Neda is never portrayed as beautiful, in fact she's kind of plain, but her privilege gives her powers of attraction. Ajay is said to be beautiful by the narrator, but no one else. No one in the novel actually says he's beautiful or handsome or gorgeous, and that's because he's a dalit servant. He's invisible to most people. He's outside beauty and inherently ugly because of his caste. The book seeing him as beautiful is more of a political statement that's hard to understand for non-Indians, I guess. And elsewhere you've got a novel of police brutality, torture, murder and suffering populated by everyday people. Ultimately, I feel that the politics of the book were lost on Mr. Garner and that's a shame, but maybe that's down to the hype too. It's a novel about the corrosive force of capitalism and corruption in a fragile democracy, in the scaffolding of a thriller. For him to see the novel he saw makes me a little frustrated more than anything, and makes me consider the myriad difficulties of cross-cultural communication, but it doesn’t hurt.

You've given such a thorough, honest answer, so I won't belabor this review, but I do have one last question on it. I'm always curious what writers think when reviewers critique an excerpt of the book—whether the writer considers it cherry-picked, or whether they agree with the general assessment.

Garner writes:

The prose heats and begins to tumble down the page like poetry, and it is hardly good poetry:

Now everything is a lie.
His life is a lie.
The pain of this is unbearable.

Or:

But he is obliterating himself.
Turning himself inside out.
Turning himself away.

How did you feel when you read this?

Well it's not meant to be good poetry! It's meant to be a fractured reflection of banal emptiness or an exhausted, drug-addled psyche. So yeah, Garner is technically right in saying it's not good poetry, but since it isn't meant to be good poetry, it doesn't hurt. I mean, if I actually wanted to try and write poetry it sure as shit wouldn't be this, and if I submitted the manuscript thinking this section contained devastating poetic lines I'd be thoroughly deluded. So I feel like he's mistaking the barren situation of the character within the novel for what he imagines are the author's non-existent attempts to be a poet.

But on the more general point of pulling an excerpt and placing it in a review free of the surrounding novel, my position is that it's relatively pointless and kind of cheap. You can basically make anything look bad in isolation if you want. I always find it dubious when I see that in a review of anyone, and I wouldn't put much stock in it. In most circumstances, especially when it's in order to illustrate a negativity, I find it critically redundant.

Can I add, the line that actually hurts is “luxe thriller.” I hate it. My publisher loves it, but I think it's ridiculous and a total mischaracterization of the novel. It makes me wonder if he actually read it. 

I want to turn now to what is, I believe, your worst review, from the Los Angeles Times, titled "A hot new Indian gangster novel thrills and dazzles. It could have done so much more." Have you read this one? 

No, I'm not a full masochist. Someone did kind of tell me that it says something weird about the Sanskrit epics.

Not a masochist? And you agree to this interview?

Anyway, here's what the reviewer said about the epics: “In centering the story of the Wadia crime syndicate, Kapoor aims to cast a light on the ways capitalism has corrupted the heroic values taught by the Sanskrit epics. 'Covetousness and avarice' trump whatever wisdom we gain in our short lives. Meanwhile, one of the major institutions charged with alleviating poverty — the Indian government — is largely absent from Kapoor’s novel. I saw this elision as a form of commentary on a right-wing government that distracts attention from its failures with demagogic appeals to religion and tribe.”

This doesn't necessarily seem like a dig at the book—we'll get to those in a moment—but I wonder: Do you disagree?

Not a full masochist. Actually I have a very thick skin, a combination of being sent to and toughened up in an Indian boarding school in the 90s (to escape the Gulf War in Bahrain, where my father was posted) and coming through my father's death while I was in college, but I do think it's psychically draining to deal with these things, which is why I'm doing this now, before I shut up shop entirely to start writing again.

Anyway, anyway. Let's have a look at this. Ok. So, according to the reviewer, I'm aiming to cast a light on the ways capitalism corrupts. So far so good. Oh wait, there's more. The ways capitalism corrupts the heroic values taught by the Sanskrit epics. Ok, wow. I need to check if the reviewer is Indian, or a Sanskritologist. One sec. Nope, doesn't seem to be. So it looks like she's taken the quotation at the start of the novel, misread it, and assumed there was a golden age of values and wisdom in the ancient past that have been corrupted by the present (she really doesn't know the Sanskrit epics). And then, if I understand the logic, laments that the novel is absent “a right-wing government that distracts attention from its failures with demagogic appeals to religion and tribe.” By this I'm assuming she means the current BJP government led by Narendra Modi. Which came into power in 2014. Oh boy, that's amusing and a little embarrassing. Because the novel ends in 2008. She's lamenting the absence of a critique of a government that didn't exist when the novel is set. She knows nothing about India. Disregard.

Your response regarding the BJP points to a larger problem in criticism, I think: the assumption that the writer is always talking about this very moment (literally an impossibility given the time it takes to write a novel and then publish it).

Before we move on to reader reviews, I do need to ask how you feel about this tidbit from the same review, given what you said about the phrase "luxe thriller": “Yet Kapoor struggles to prick the conscience of the reader, in part because Ajay is an observer who offers little insight. He becomes Echo to Sunny’s Narcissus. In detailing the gaudy excesses of the rich — the designer labels, the expensive liquors, the furnishings, the lush travel — Kapoor only enhances their fetishistic status. The glitz feels aspirational rather than cautionary, despite the author’s clear disdain.”

Perhaps you're being generous by arguing she assumed I intended to use a past moment to comment on the current moment, if that is indeed what you're saying. But yes, I totally agree that it often appears a default setting to assume the writer is using whatever they're writing to speak of the present moment. Like, “this analysis of Communist Poland is actually a whip-smart critique of the Trump administration.” No, sometimes a spade is a spade. But what she might not understand, because she doesn't understand India (and for the record, she doesn't have to, nor does any reader, it's also a story about people) is that we're working on a continuum. The Congress corruption years led into an anti-corruption movement that was strategically, cynically, masterfully co-opted by the BJP machine in order to help them seize power. We're only in the early to mid 2000s, and we're only on the first book of three. This is also why I'm not really concerned by some of the criticism. We're only a third of the way into the story. It will make sense as a whole (and I have this idea that once the whole story is done, I'll do as Matthiessen did with Shadow Country and revise and condense the thing into one giant volume—I'm very much in love with the idea of revisions, re-writing novels after many years, something I intend to do with my first novel in another twenty years or so. I'm especially enamoured of this idea in a culture attuned to efficiency and minimising waste. But I digress).

As to her other quote, it honestly means nothing to me, in that I've read it many times and I still can't really make good sense of it. For her, Ajay is an observer who offers little insight, and so “the reader's” conscience isn't pricked? Well, firstly it's not the universal reader, it's one reader. It should be: “This reader's conscience wasn't pricked because Ajay didn't unpack his situation.” Like, OK. Unpacking is a very Western thing. And Ajay isn't there to do that. As I'm not there to prick the conscience of the reader. I'm really not trying to make them feel a certain way by force. I'm there to present the situations of everyone and let you stew in them, marinate in them, soak up their juices (sorry, my husband is currently cooking gyudon).

But, you know, chalo, I have no real animosity toward her. She's just trying to pay the bills. 

Doing this series, reading reader reviews on Goodreads et al, I'm always surprised by how certain ideas of a book—whether propagated by the publisher or otherwise—makes their way into the minds of readers. In your case, this idea is that the book is an Indian version of The Godfather (or perhaps India's answer to The Godfather). The phrase “Godfather,” in fact, appears in over 100 reviews on Goodreads alone. Do you think it’s an accurate comparison? Is it something you welcome?

No, I don't think it's accurate at all. It was never in my mind, it was never something I thought about. I don't think there's any real comparison. Neda, Ajay, Rastogi, forced acquisition of farmland, caste violence, state corruption, the transformation of a country after economic reform, it's got nothing to do with The Godfather. But I've noticed that because I have Sunny, and The Godfather has Sonny, some people seem to assume that it's a direct reference or a play on The Godfather. The truth is Sunny is just a common male name in North India and has the same syllable count and ring to it as the name of a man I once knew. Ok sure, you've got a criminal empire of influence and fathers and sons, but nothing else is similar. But I've stopped getting upset about it. Some people are like: It's nothing like The Godfather! I hate it. And some people are like: It's like The Godfather, I love it! What to do? In an ideal world it wouldn't be the reference point. But like Special Agent Dale Cooper says: “Once a traveler leaves his home he loses almost 100% of his ability to control his environment.”

As I also said in another interview: it shouldn't be “India's answer” to anything.

One other theme—and perhaps this is inevitable given the book is relatively long—is the involvement (or lack thereof) of an editor: “Has so much potential but dear god this needs an editor.”; “Warning- it is 550 pages a.k.a. where was the editor?”; “this book is in serious need of an editor”; “This needed a good editor with a sharp pencil.”; “I started out loving this book, but it needs an editor.”; “Where the fuck are the editors?”; “her editors completely failed her”; “Not sure if Penguin Random House had to cut all their editors due to the pandemic or what”; “WHERE ARE THE EDITORS?? Who is approving these unnecessarily long and boring books??? Why????” (Some of these come from generally positive reviews.)

Based on what you've said so far, I assume you are immune to this gripe, and very intentionally wrote a book of the length you did. But given this series is about criticism and feedback, I wonder: How did you find the editorial process? Are you someone who takes a lot of the edits you get?

I think a lot of these “needs an editor” gripes can be translated into: I don't like where the book goes and what it does. And that's on me. But that's what I wanted to do. Believe me, it wasn't the lack of an editor that made the book like this, it was my refusal to “behave” as a writer and follow editorial suggestions. So they can blame me, not the editors. I'm very much aware that I could have written The Ajay Novel, the hero's journey, a redemption arc, cut out the “extraneous” stories and digressions, and done far more successfully with these readers, but I wasn't interested in that. And interestingly, a good majority of Indian readers don't have this gripe, presumably because they understand the importance of the parts and aren't so wedded to Ajay as the hero. Western readers are obsessed with Ajay. But the Ajay novel is the kind of novel a foreigner would write, a Memoirs of a Geisha.

As for the editing process, it's always painful. I often feel like editors want to shape and fix and “unpack,” whereas my natural position is resistance. 

Do you feel that this reviewer (from Goodreads) is also locked in a Western perspective?

The character sketches are caricatures despite spending a great deal of time on their backgrounds.

The men are one of three types:

-the most benign are the sycophantic assholes
-an assortment of both garden variety and malignant narcissists
-slippery and dangerous sociopathic demon lords

The behaviors are incongruent and psychologically unbelievable for the amount of sadism and violence inflicted. This makes no fuckin sense given their backgrounds. 80 percent of Indian men cannot all be one or more of the above. Just awful !

The lone female love interest in an entitled ever-suffering twat of a young woman. Again her background is no explanation for her less evil but equally repellent ways.

In a nutshell this book is both EMPTILY DISGUSTING and DISGUSTINGLY EMPTY.

I enjoyed visiting different parts of India but this book is ingrained in my psyche and will take a long time to recover from.

I will never read another book by this author. Adios ! 

No, I don't think this is specifically Western. It's a great review though. The book got under their skin. I wish them a healthy recovery after their India trip. I gave them the equivalent of backpacker's dysentery.

I have a feeling this won't phase you either, but a few readers were disappointed with the ending: “The ending was pages of words free falling out of the author’s consciousness.”; “The ending is terrible.”; “I don’t recommend this book, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so mad over the ending of a book. This went through excruciating detail and repetition of horrible and complex gritty depictions, just to leave on a cliff-hanger.”

I assume you ended the book the way you did because it’s the first of a trilogy, but did you sense it would leave some readers miffed?

There are two kinds of reactions to the ending and you've outlined both here. The first is that the words and the writing seem to collapse, to fall, or fall apart. I agree with this, it's part intentional and part uncontrollable. I find it personally fascinating for reasons I'll come to. The second response is like: “Is that it?” They feel the ending is abrupt in story terms, there's no payoff or resolution, and it is unsatisfying. I have some sympathy for those readers, if only because it hasn't been made clear to them that this is only the first part. I've seen people saying online that there are “rumors” this is only the first book of a trilogy, but I never made a secret that this was the first book, it was sold as a trilogy, it was written as the first part, so this is something out of my control. But I know there will be the next one and the one after that and when all is done there will be a different way of looking at it. So I'm relaxed.

The first reaction is more interesting to me, because there's truth in it. You see, as I wrote this world, the world began to take over. I started out with complete authorial control, but as I let the world go down its dark avenues, chaos began to seep in. Sunil Rastogi appeared one day while I was in a writing residency in Saint-Nazaire, on France's north-west, Atlantic coast. This wasn't a glamourous residency, it was in an old apartment on the docks, with interiors you might find in the 80s. WWII Nazi submarine yards around us. It was off-season, cold and rainy most of the time. I loved it for its bleakness, and Sunil Rastogi arrived unbidden with all his malevolence, with all the violence in Uttar Pradesh upon which the glamour and wealth are built. So yes, chaos arrived and chaos hounded me to the end. Chaos, disgust, rage, anger, fatigue. Sunny had made his choice and he had to live with it, and the second half of the novel represented that. I accepted this and guided the narrative toward “deteriorate.” I use this word very carefully. The novel didn't deteriorate in the pejorative or colloquial sense. I led it there and let it take over. Do you know William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops? The words in the novel were like the looping tape ribbon, wearing down over time, disintegrating. I know some people won't accept this but it's the truth. Age of Vice disgusted and wore me down. Sunny disgusted and wore me down. What these characters do to each other wore me down. They created violence. And I ran with it. This violence manifested itself in the form of the words, rushing forward toward collapse. That this happened to me was significant, a significant part of my life. It was what the novel demanded of me and even though it might be characterised as a failure by some readers, I make no apologies for it. I do accept it will upset people, it will piss them off, it will disappoint, it will annoy. But this is kali-yuga after all.

Having said all this, the last lines, the abruptness of them, they were super calculated. Written well in advance. I believed they would have an impact. I didn't think too hard about what kind.

You've been generous with your time, energy, and honesty, and I'll let you off now. But before we end the interview, I am curious about Age of Vice being presented not as a trilogy but a standalone book. Publishers are known to do this. Was this explicitly discussed? Do you feel the book was misrepresented in any way?

As they say in the police dramas: “I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.”

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Postscript from Deepti:

I've been thinking about my answers here, especially concerning readers' reaction to the ending. I've defended my intentions, but it occurs to me there's one other possibility, one that I imagine haunts all novelists: “I didn't do my job. I failed to execute my plan. I am a failure.” I think this is always the fear. It's always so painful to see the novel in your head become the novel on the page, with all the loss and leakage and compromise, all the inability to articulate that perfect vision you carried, and still carry. So I want to say this: no amount of criticism, hate, anger, annoyance, derision, nitpicking or disappointment will ever be as harsh as the criticism living inside the author's head. I know every single thing that's wrong with my novel, problems that no one else will ever see, or even comprehend, which perhaps don't even exist outside my mind. And I have to live with the pain of these every single day. One day, maybe one day, I'll get it right. That's the dream.