n my final year at a boarding school in England I was assigned some compulsory reading to take home for the Christmas vacation: E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Home was New Delhi, but thanks to an irregularity in my passport I spent nine hours in the arrival lounge of Indira Gandhi International Airport. The irony was irresistible and I read the whole book before my parents could embrace me. When I returned to school I was pleased to find myself the class authority on the novel. I was, after all, from India. All through that semester I was allowed to judge the authenticity of Forster's descriptions of the India of the 1920s. I remember giving him high marks. But I was appalled at the final scene denying the possibility of a meeting of minds between Dr. Aziz and Fielding—between East and West: "The temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House—they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet.' "

That was then. Now I'm not so sure. I'm back in Delhi, but having tackled the assigned reading for this review—three books by U.S.-based authors—I find myself at a disadvantage. The books themselves are resolutely "Indian" in setting: Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton, $24.95) unfurls in a small apartment building in Bombay, Vineeta Vijayaraghavan's Motherland (Soho, $23) is a homecoming novella about a Malayali-American teenager finding her roots, and Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers (Anchor, $15 paper) is a torrid family epic set in Partition-era Punjab. The authors—though this hardly needs saying—are of Indian origin, or, as we say in India, "NRIs": Non-Resident Indians. Suri, born in Bombay, lives in Maryland; Baldwin, born in Montreal, grew up in India and lives in Milwaukee; Vijayaraghavan was born in India, raised in the United States, and last seen at the Harvard Business School. Does any of this matter? Surely, as Salman Rushdie insisted in his introduction to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997, "Literature has little or nothing to do with a writer's home address."

In a better world, perhaps. But in this cruel era of cross-cultural misunderstandings, Rushdie was speaking from an Unknown Location, and, I fear, through an unspecified orifice. In the same essay he went on to raise the hackles of many readers of Indian home address by maintaining that "the prose writing . . . by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 'official languages' of India, the so-called 'vernacular languages.' " He allowed that this may be a problem of translation, and since I only read English myself, I won't contradict him here, except to point out that English is also one of the "official languages" of India. And that Indian writers working in English are often engaged in translation. And they're not doing it for anyone with my zip code.

Three books of any genre would be a very small sample. And these three books are very distinct in style and narrative. So how can I account for the fact that two of these novels (The Death of Vishnu and What the Body Remembers) are framed in tales of souls in the throes of rebirth? That both are interspersed with walk-on parts for the Indifferent Gods?

Baldwin, for example, repeatedly uses "the wind-god Vayu, bearer of perfume, god of all the Northwest of India," as a device to breeze through a potted history of India:

In the ages since he first inhaled, before India was ever called India, Vayu has guided army after army through the mountain passes to Punjab. . . . It was Vayu who rode in the manes of horses when the Persians and Afghans sacked Lahore and snatched away its women.

Meanwhile, Suri, who keeps a stable of avatars at his disposal, employs "Kalki, the white horse of Vishnu," to set up an episode of religious strife:

From the heavens I descend with Vishnu to gallop across the waning days. . . . Sometimes . . . when he pets my mane and whispers in my ear, when I see him donning his battle gear . . . I remember the work we have come down to do. . . . For the country has been overrun by barbarians. Infidels rule the land. They have buried the teachings of the Vedas, they have poisoned the air with their alien ways.

Vineeta Vijayaraghavan is less inclined to Hinduistical Realism—thank Gods!—but not above sharing an extended account of the utterly familiar parable of Rama's betrayal of Sita in the Ramayana. To the Indian reader, at least, this is the moral equivalent of informing us that Jesus was betrayed by a kiss.

Similarly, all three books are peppered with set pieces on spicy food, master-servant dynamics, and redeeming vignettes on the possibility of romance in an arranged marriage. Reincarnation, Mighty Avatars, Spicy Food, Servants, Arranged Marriage. Sound familiar?

I'm being a little unfair. Indian literature has been burdened with such problems of "translation" ever since Thomas Babington Macaulay's notorious remark in 1835: "I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. . . . I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." In the space between that imperious pronouncement and Rushdie's neo-Macaulayan dismissal of vernacular literature, Indians writing in English have had to face the double standard of occidental tastes and local authenticity. Their task has been complicated by one of the perverse consequences of colonialism: While English-reading (and certainly English-writing) Indians acquire—perforce—a relatively high degree of familiarity with the cultural idiom of Western literature, Western readers have by and large retained a privileged ignorance of the East. This bald fact has inevitably been something of a creative stumbling block, but equally it has driven some gifted writers to startling feats of crossover genius. G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, I. Allan Sealy's The Trotter Nama, and Rushdie's own Midnight's Children were landmarks of this type. More recently, Arundhati Roy's success sparked a minor frenzy of publishing interest in Indian authors. But despite (or perhaps because of) the phenomenon of The God of Small Things, there have been few signs that authors from the subcontinent can make it without trading heavily on exotic or esoteric images of India.

Maybe that's how it should be. Good books usually confound expectations with all the serendipity of, well, Serendip (which is, of course, just off the coast of India). What we have here, unfortunately, is merely the Next Wave.

For the record, I would have hated What the Body Remembers just as much if it had been set in rural Saskatchewan (though I think it's unlikely her editors would have tolerated the same weight of explanatory detail they allow for Punjab). As it stands, the most I could hope for was some cue like "he assumes an explaining tone" before I ran into a tired disquisition on the Sikh religion or Indian nationalism. There was no escaping the language, however. Baldwin is one of those writers whose idea of inflecting dialogue with local color is to endlessly repeat a few vernacular nouns and ejaculations. Her particular favorites are "Quom" (a horrendous mistransliteration of the Urdu Qaum, meaning a people, or community) and "Hai!" as in "Hai, he's going to tear it!" (To share my agony you might have to imagine a dirndl-ripper set in Germany but written in English, with women going "Ach!" every three minutes.) Then there's the Indic echolalia of words like "good-good," "sweet-sweet," "small-small," and "little-little" rising to a frequency of five such utterances in half a page.

It's not that I object to wordplay: There was a complicit delight in the language of Midnight's Children or H. Hatterr, which worked because they didn't try to mimic the argot—just the spirit of irrepressible wordplay so familiar to bilingual Indians. Baldwin's cuteness, I suspect, owes more to The God of Small-Small Things.

By far the worst thing about this book, however, is the relentless melodrama of the central relationship between the child-bride heroine, Roop, and her rival cowife, Satya, culminating in the latter's suicide by tubercular French kiss! Hai, Hai!

Motherland is a very different story. Maya, the preternaturally mature teenaged narrator, is thankfully free of any such Sturm und Drang. Her language, too, is free of affectation, the voice implicitly American. She does occasionally comment on the accents of native South Indians ("He pronounced the 'ch' in Chicago like 'cherry' "), but such observations are entirely appropriate for the character. In fact, the only culturally jarring utterances are those of Maya's cousin Madhu, who is from England—where they didn't have "bachelorette parties" the last time I checked. But hey—everything in this book has passed through the cortex of an American teenager, so what do I know?

In fact, a cloak-and-dagger subplot (relating to the search for the Tamil Tiger assassins of Rajiv Gandhi) shoehorned into the otherwise subtle familial intimacy of the novel raises a suspicion that Vijayaraghavan has a teenage readership in mind. And given her narrative device—a 15-year-old NRI's story told in the past tense—it's hard to fault her on the grounds of accuracy. It's true, as Jhumpa Lahiri recently complained, that some Indian critics like to accuse NRI writers of inauthenticity. But Vijayaraghavan may have taken that danger a little too seriously. Her book suffers instead from an excess of "authentic" detail, a relentless flow of innocuous information. It can sound like a recipe, and frequently it is: "I looked with envy at my grandmother, eating her plate of kanjivellum, rice served in its own water, with cucumber steamed till it softened and then sautéed with mustard seeds." Elsewhere, this compulsion to inform leads to unnecessary generalizations:

Not having a birth-chart, or horoscope, in India was like missing a basic appendage. Families commissioned a horoscope based on the date and time of their children's birth to guide them in every endeavour: what subjects to study, what medicines to take, what gods to propitiate, what husbands to marry.

This is India by numbers. Hinduism 101.

The recent book Getting There by the Delhi-based playwright and author Manjula Padmanabhan offers a revealing contrast with Motherland. It seems almost devoid of local detail by comparison but tells a far more engaging and convincing story of a young woman's road to contentment. Her physical journey, unfortunately, is from India to the U.S. and Europe, which may be why the publisher, Picador, hesitated to release it outside India.

Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu (published simultaneously in India and the U.S.) is certainly the most imaginative of these three books, and consequently the least burdened by the Explanatory Imperative. He captures the topography of Bombay with a slightly nostalgic lightness, but the real stage of his novel is the apartment building on whose steps the protagonist does his eponymous thing. The plot spirals through the dying Vishnu's unconscious memories and delusions of newfound divinity while a parallel coil threads keyhole portraits of the building's mortal residents and their reactions to the comatose hero in the stairwell. It's an ambitious idea, reminiscent of both Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and, more perilously, Rushdie's ill-fated Satanic Verses: Where Gibreel Farishta falls to his doom, Vishnu ascends to his rebirth. Similarly, while Rushdie chanced his hand by prostituting the wives of the prophet "Mahound," Suri chooses a whore as the consort of the terrestrial Vishnu. More generally, the Bhagavad Gita is to Suri's book what the Koran is to Rushdie's.

I don't mean to suggest that Suri should change his address. Hindu fanatics are slightly less doctrinaire about the written word than their Islamic counterparts. But the weight of Hindu mythology in this book, and the structure of spiritual enlightenment that shapes its narrative, is a corny schematic burden that crushes the life out of The Death of Vishnu right at the first floor. The characters who populate Vishnu's building begin with two-dimensional penny-pinching squabblers and rise in emotional depth as Vishnu mounts the stairs. As a result, it's only in the closing stages of the novel that you begin to care for some of the characters. But by the time you meet the ascetic hermit Vinod Taneja in the garrets of the final chapters you may be ready to renounce the Great Indian Novel.

But wait! If your heart is pure you may yet find what you seek. So before you buy any of these books, consider the options: If you want the domestic intricacies of a crowded neighborhood, read Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley. If you want a homecoming-of-age novel with a multicultural twist, try Manjula Padmanabhan's Getting There. If you want a feminine melodrama set against the sweeping winds of history—don't bother. You probably read The Thorn Birds when you were 13. And if you simply must read a book about India, buy the Lonely Planet guide.

Kai Friese is a writer and magazine editor who lives in New Delhi.

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