Amazon.com Review
"References to my mother's not feeding me enough, sometimes overt, sometimes snide, had a currency amongst the neighbors at whose houses I often ate. I considered these insults a fee one had to pay for eating their food, for demanding their friendship, for sleeping in their beds, partaking of their quarrels, sharing their holidays, walking their dogs, making love to them, even sharing in their dreams. Generosity is often spiked." That's Cyrus Readymoney speaking. He's smart. He's silver-tongued. He's shameless. He's all of 8 years old, the narrator and main attraction of Beach Boy, Ardashir Vakil's widely praised first novel of growing up Parsi in Bombay, circa 1970.
Cyrus is the newest initiate in the club of boyish spellbinders whose members include Edwin Mullhouse, Holden Caulfield, and Paddy Clarke, those good bad boys whose uncensored conjurings remind us how titillating, entertaining, and essentially mysterious life can be before manners and received opinions settle upon it like a veneer of dust. The benign neglect of his wealthy family not only affords Cyrus endless opportunities to observe his neighbors and tag along on their adventures, but it gives Beach Boy a cast of characters as wonderfully diverse as middle-class India itself. The big, athletic Krishnan family; the Maharani and her seductive daughter; Minoo and Mehroo Readymoney, Cyrus's cosmopolitan and self-involved progenitors; the household servant Bhagwan; brusque Aunty Zenobia; Mrs. Verma of the hundred different smiles--Ardashir Vakil evokes them all with naughty gusto. Since Cyrus is already wildly precocious and agelessly astute, calling Beach Boy a coming-of-age story in the traditional sense seems wrong. As his parents' marital difficulties reach crisis proportions, what our young hero loses is not so much his innocence, or his illusions, as his child's license to roam freely, an opportunist of insight and experience. By the time Cyrus suffers his first grown-up losses, we feel them, too, because he has given us so much delight, because we understand how deeply resonant his impish spirit is. --Joyce Thompson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Marrying a universal story (an adolescent boy's coming-of-age) with a specific locale (India in the 1970s), Indian writer Vakil has produced a charming and agreeable first novel distinguished by vivid detail, wry humor and charismatic characters. Like many young boys, Cyrus Readymoney has simple fascinations: movie stars and neighborhood girls. He spends most of his days angling for entry to the nearby cinema, where his observations of Hindi film make for some of the book's most lyrical passages ("Waiting for the film to begin, I understood the meaning of time passing, of time wasted, of being left behind by time"). When not at the movies, he explores sex, both through glimpses of adult women and through furtive forays with other children. An indifferent student, Cyrus seems to actually take pleasure in the beatings his misbehavior provokes from his school principal. His parents seem satisfied with guest appearances in his life, mainly to denigrate him on the tennis court (in his mother's case) or to make vague reassurances of their love (his father's contribution). The parents' troubled marriage provides constant background noise, but, distant as they are from Cyrus's everyday life, the parents' battles, though vicious, seem not to affect him. When they finally separate, he has no inkling of the dire events to follow. Meanwhile, Cyrus guides the reader through Bombay , which Vakil (a native of that city) renders in a lush sensual arrangement ("Mountains of puffed rice, yellow sev, purple onions, earthenware matkas full of spiced water"). In the end, Cyrus's passage from boyhood to a sobered adolescence comes through a wrenching loss, but a gentle lesson teaches him that he can survive life's cruel surprises. QPB alternate. (Aug.) FYI: Beach Boy was nominated for Britain's Whitbread Prize and won a Betty Trask Award.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
