The God of Small Things 🍋

🎵The song for this post is Bloody Tears, by Kenichi Matsubara, for Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, arranged for the piano by purpleschala. 🎵

One way to describe the Saw franchise is "gore porn": you have a bunch of non-gore scenes that the audience (and actors) are mostly asleep for, which contain very hammy dialogue to give you the illusion of a plot. Really, we're here for the porn, which in the case of Saw, is people getting righteously ripped open, impaled, melted, and blown to pieces.

The God of Small Things is tragedy porn. It's beat down after beat down: every sweet gesture is punished, every hope is a seed of that character's destruction, every person gets put in a position to do a maximally damaging thing, then does it. If they don't, they get punished. To say this novel is "brutal" is to call a Saw movie "gory." It's accurate, but you're still not really getting how much.

The world can definitely be punishing and uncaring. But in fiction, the world is crafted. If dreams and hopes get crushed, it's because someone authored it that way. When we see characters get mutilated, abused, traumatized, defiled and discarded, it's because Ms. Roy, for them, is The God of Small Things, doing it to them.

(the opposite of this would be hugboxer fiction, which I've discussed before)

To be clear, this only works because the craft is astounding. The narrative structure and the prose are clearly the work of a deeply talented person, who obsessed over this for years. It's swinging all the time, and while some are misses, many, many are home runs.

I've got three "islands" of reactions: a read on the composition of the piece ("tragedy porn"), a read on the themes and structure for one of its subplots, and one on the craft. At the end I add some selected annotations from my reading that don't fit into the islands.

Fighting over Sarah Kane

Still from a production of Blasted in 1995, via

The first read is the one I started in the intro: why create and share such brutality? When is it "too much"?

In college, for 3 years I was part of a theatre board that read ~70 plays during the year, then convened in May to decide next year's season. Every year, without fail, we had "the Sarah Kane ritual." Sarah Kane was an edgy playwright in the 90's whose work was gory and depressing. At the end of Blasted a man digs up a baby who was buried earlier in the show, and eats it. It's fair to claim 4:48 Psychosis glorifies suicide.¹ Sarah Kane died by hanging herself by her shoelaces.

I learned that the play's real impact was the discussion about producing it. We were never going to put on 4:48 Psychosis. But we always had to have this ritual so someone on the board (usually many people) could tearfully admit that they were suicidal. We talked about it so someone could follow that up by putting ice in our veins and call us cowards for being squeamish about Authentic Art, man. Someone would say, like I just did, "this glorifies suicide!" and conclude "it's irresponsible to put this on," then someone else would yell "that's why we have to put it on!" and someone else would be like "the blood would be on our hands!"

And our undergrad bodies would leave the meeting feeling alive and like Serious Artists after a ton of catharsis. But after I saw us do this a second time the next year, I was less moved. Going into a third time my senior year, I was kind of Done With It.

I was very moved by the tragedies in The God of Small Things. But also... it felt like Sarah Kane again? And talking to people who loved it, I think they're working out their Sarah Kane discussions for the first time. Good for them? But I've done this so much already. I spent my entire 20's feeling like stories like this are more real and more authentic because they're so fucking sad. It was tremendously hard to break out of that. While I loved it and felt very moved, I felt there were a few overreaches, where brutality was the preferred child given all the narrative food, others siblings left to starve.

I don't need stories to be happy or make me feel good. Truly: fuck me up. But to use the porn example again, I think some people are rounding up the work because it's succeeding at titillating them. In actual porn the titillation is all the nudity and fucking. Here, it's hitting the pleasure center of a hopeless and depressed person of "see the world can be so fucked, can't it?!" and I've done that enough. There's horror, and then there's The Human Centipede. There's sad work, and then there's this.

Paper worlds, nerdy noble heroes, and Randian struggle

I played the BioShock games in January and loved them as a critique of Ayn Rand junk food narratives.

I've spoken a ton about porn already, so I'll introduce another metaphor: "junk food," or, narratives that are designed so precisely to hit the pleasure centers of the target audience's brain (kind of like how every Cheeto is a triumph of the human endeavor, how it perfectly melts in your mouth after that satisfying crunch with the perfect coating of cheese powder). Junk food is designed in a lab to reach pleasure centers that are the result of millions of years of evolution. They're focused-grouped to death. If you sincerely can't understand what's so good about eating a Pringle, you're actively denying part of your humanity.

So there's a genre of plotting that I call "nerd junk food," which is a structure that hits nerd pleasure centers directly. They're shaped like this:

• There is a lot wrong with the world; it's full of venal, untalented, midwit assholes.

• But some people, including the protagonist, are brilliant. They may come from an underprivileged position (like Velutha being Dalit), and they're always kept down by the first group. Improvements to the world rest on these Special People using their talents, in spite of the midwits.

This structure then lets the author relate "the genius" to the reader, and the reader's feelings of being put down by a world that doesn't appreciate their brilliance, and robs them of the success they're entitled to. Examples are:

• Ender's Game, where Ender's siblings changed world politics via anonymous message boards through their brilliant arguments. Ender blew away his peers in the war game simulations by just being so much more clever. He's very lonely for all his talents, and spends the whole book getting bullied. Just like you, Dear Reader. I wrote a bit about it here but this essay goes much harder into it.

• Castlevania (Netflix): the Belmonts get driven to exile and ruin by an ungrateful and ignorant populace, the Speakers (Sypha) get chased out of town for their charity because of local superstition, and Alucard is the hated son of Dracula. Hector and Isaac are used as instruments of the power-hungry but less capable vampires for their forgemastery. Almost every population center is either run by talentless, ignorant ambition (the Church) or the people are reduced to cattle-level stupid (the villagers in Season 4 cooking where they shit, before Sypha organizes them). This Twitter thread does a great job showing its connection to "nerd junk food."

• Paul Graham essays pre-YC, during which he wrote a lot of Hackers and Painters. So much of his early work had variations of "if you write Lisp, it means you're smart and will be smarter than everyone else. You can become a millionaire like me! Also, aren't finance people awful? Not like us. We're like painters, actually. The people who shoved you into lockers in HS were lesser, but you'll get the last laugh." He changed his tune regarding finance people and traditional power structures pretty hard after being and surrounding himself with rich people for long enough.

• The Incredibles. The world has got "supers" who get put down and neutered by non-supers who can't handle or properly appreciate their talent. The villain is a guy who Just Doesn't Got The Stuff trying so hard to prove he does ("if everyone is super, nobody is!"). But no: he's just a midwit, and you can't make someone Super who isn't.

The biggest example: Ayn Rand! All of her heroes are square-jawed, handsome innovators; all her villains are pathetic, chinless shitheels. The world is full of moochers trying to bring The Good Guys down.

This all came to mind in Small Things.

Craft, and who gets to be Shakespeare

I always felt weird growing up when people talked about how brilliant Shakespeare was by saying "he invented thousands of new words!" because I feel like if I tried that, most people would be like "Pablo man, come back down to Earth." As with engineers and novel technologies, if you ask people to think upfront, you're usually met with disdain. It takes something really special to make people get over the hump and invest.

Ms. Roy goes hard, craft-wise. At times I found it indulgent and had less appetite for it, but it had many moments of sublime success, and on the whole the craft was one of my favorite things about the book. Something I say frequently: I'd rather tell someone to pull back than have to push them forward. Too much art feels safely crafted.

I'm left wondering: how do we decide who gets to be Shakespeare, and take real liberties? When does a work have "the juice"? How would it feel reading this story with any other writing style, and what other stories would this writing style serve? I think it's one of the big successes of this novel that its craft and content are so well-married that you can't really imagine one without the other.

Other notes, miscellaneous

These are a few passages I highlighted and why they resonated. Here I won't care about spoilers as much. Proceed at your own risk.

There's a passage where Baby Kochamma's addiction to dish TV is described like:

Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coup d'etats—they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel.

Reminded me a lot about how my grandparents, who immigrated to the States and never really found a regular, in-person community, did find television. As did everyone else in the 90's. The more I talk to Zoomers (or younger), the more clear it is they can't conceptualize a pre-smartphone or pre-Internet world, and while it's only in my childhood and adolescence: TV was the whole world, man. Beamed into your home. I loved this whole section so much because it did describe the wonder and horror of television when it was at its peak. The closest parallel I've seen since is TikTok (and sort of YouTube) which finally got the feed good enough that you can just look at content for several hours and lose the whole day, every day, like you could with TV.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined

While Annalisa didn't die (thank God! 🙏), she lost a lot of memories we shared as adolescents that I still mourn. I love me some empiricism but grief reminds you that God laughs at your hopes to make sense of things, using numbers to tell you anything about healing. Life will take what it needs.

When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jeweled bride. Her silk sunset-colored sari shot with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eyebrows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu's soft mouth would twist into a small, bitter smile at the memory—not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile.

Like polishing firewood.

A very major crush in my 30's was someone who was divorced, and (I think?) had a big wedding. In my fantasies, where we'd have a sweet courtship, get married, and start a family, there was always a speed bump over "there is no way she'll be as enthusiastic at a big, hopeful wedding like I'd be" because... she'd done it before. And it didn't work out.

I think life is a lot about leaping without looking, risk-taking, and that means having a wedding as joyfully as you fucking can. But on top of all the other traumas or pains about divorce, seeing your young self so decorated, surrounded by all the important people in your life, remembering how ready and hopeful you felt to embark on a dream life, and to know it didn't work out, despite your best efforts? Gotta be brutal. Really felt for Ammu here.

"Stop posing as the children's Great Savior!" Ammu said. "When it comes down to brass tacks, you don't give a dam about them. Or me." "Should I?" Chacko said. "Are they my responsibility?" He said that Ammu and Estha and Rahel were millstones around his neck.

A book I kept thinking about while reading this was The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. I read this in college (15 years ago!?!) and loved it, I don't know how well it aged. But it's got this one very provocative message, when the character makes a choice that he knows will condemn his family to a poor fate. Paraphrased:

Family is what keeps India in poverty. The bonds that keep the poor in their place; if we could only relinquish them, then India would flourish.

Our family of immigrants was my first community, the only one I haven't shed (oof! just got some feelings typing that out 😮), and while we've grown to very different places, it still feels like they're all I've got at the end of the day. When you pander to Latinos (Coco, Encanto, Book of Life) a character always looks at the camera and says "Family comes first." So it was a wild thought that they can maybe... they can hold you back? And not in the "it hurts sometimes but it's still worth it" way, I mean the "really, you and they would live better lives and be better off if you just ghosted them and ignored all your commitments to them."

One woman I dated very seriously didn't have these bonds. And while I think she longed for them, she also never seemed to have trouble identifying her desires, or actualizing her life in the direction of them. She seemed to be missing the "how will this impact my family? what will they think, how will they judge me?" conditional, and I never noticed how often (and how strong) its presence was in my life. So this little passage rocked me a bit. It's a theme I still chew on a lot, and it's all over this book in passages like the above.

1. ^ These are obviously very elementary and reductive reads of Sarah Kane's work; Theatre Pablo could give you a lot more here but bear with me, it's a blog post (and I haven't read her work since college).