by Deepti Kapoor ★★★★☆
Age of Vice opens with a tragic accident: a speeding car runs over and kills five people sleeping on the streets of Delhi. A man, identified as Ajay, is found behind the wheel of the vehicle and taken into custody. Before long, we realize that he's a highly skilled fighter as well as, what the head of the prison calls, a "Wadia man". Thus begins this sprawling novel set in India that traces the life of Ajay from its impoverished beginnings through his eventual encounter and connection with a man named Sunny Wadia and the Wadia family, and the events leading up to and eventually following the accident described.
Author Kapoor tells a series of events from three main perspectives: Ajay's, Sunny Wadia's, and Sunny's love interest, Neda. Each telling reveals more about one or more of the characters, as well as the events in question. The Wadias, for lack of a more creative description, are effectively the "Corleone family of India", with multi-layered business interests, fueled by corruption and intimidation at all levels of the country. The novel is an intriguing character study combined with a well-plotted story, and I was firmly in its grip for the first half or more. However, it takes a bit of an unexpected turn in its final 100 pages, and it ends fairly abruptly, and both of those things left me wanting something different and something more.
Without giving too much away, Kapoor introduces a new character out of the blue in the last 100 pages of the novel that ends up playing a major role, after spending the first 350+ pages with no hint or mention of this person while focused solely on, essentially, the three main characters I mentioned above. The self-told backstory of the "11th hour character" felt both too long ("why are we going on and on about this random guy?"), and then at the end too short ("wait, why didn't we learn about him sooner?"). It's somewhat jarring, and it made me wonder if Kapoor got stuck -- the novel kept growing, and she was unsure where to take it or how to end it, and so invented this fairly unconnected way to wrap it up.
Aside from that disappointing component, though, I mostly enjoyed this. It felt like an honest exploration of the rise of wealth in India over the last 30 years, as well as the resulting wealth gap and corruption that sprung from that. Worth a read.
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