Book Review: The White Tiger

The narrator of Aravind Adiga's hilarious, morally-complicated tale is a self-confessed murderer, and he wants you to like him.

Balram Halwai is a wily kid from a backward village in North India who's lived a life of brutal poverty and is determined to succeed as a rich man's driver in the ruthless, crowded chaos of New Delhi. Balram likes to call himself an entrepreneur, which means he's a hustler. He hustles for a living, and he's hustling you, the reader, as he tells his story. You can't help but laugh as you see through him, but Balram wants you to be on his side, and before long you are. By page 36 of The White Tiger you know that the narrator will slit his master's throat. The confounding thing is that, the farther you read, the more you discover that the master is the one character who is kind to Balram!

The writing is so natural and laugh-out-loud funny that the book zips along, exhilaratingly satirical with a stinging bite, just pissed-off enough. Though you know the one chilling fact about the ending, you don't know the when, why or how. For the last hundred pages I made everyone around me miserable, pacing and gasping, because I couldn't put it down.

Adiga lets you inside Balram's mind so that you grow to love him, and when he misbehaves you suffer and worry and sweat. You will never forget the murder scene--and neither will the poor people trapped on the bus with me. It's one of the best first novels in years, comparable with Mohsin Hamid's little masterpiece, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an angry political novel presented as a word-perfect satirical delight, a banquet of moral complexity that will keep you laughing and thinking long after it's finished.--Nick DiMartino