Shobhaa De and Literary Snobs

I know Shobhaa Dé doesn’t need me to defend her honour. But, I’ll do it anyway. And now I’ve given away what I originally set out to do with this blogpost. The joke, as it so often turns out, is on me. Not all reviewers are literary snobs and killjoys. I counted two reviews of her new novel Sethji that work past the now-tautology that Shobhaa Dé produces ‘bad writing’. One is by Sagarika Ghose and the other is by Anuja Chauhan (who has written a far better political novel than Dé’s).

Apart from these two exceptions, I’m exasperated with the standard Shobhaa Dé hatchet job. I’m not getting into the rather pointless genre v/s literary fiction debate and I don’t particularly care whether Dé suits an individual reviewer’s taste. I just want a review to alert me to things other the badness of the book. The thumbs-up or thumbs-down model of cultural writing is, to quote the Black Eyed Peas, “so two thousand and late”.