‘I wanted to go against the grain and the reader’s expectation’: Abraham Verghese

Yeah, sometimes research becomes an excuse not to write, because you can endlessly go down these rabbit holes. There comes a point when you just have to write. In preparing for the novel, I took several trips to Kerala and called on my relatives and friends living there who had more immediate knowledge than I did, because I wasn’t born in the state. I was only familiar with it from school and medical school vacations, which is not the same as growing up there and being fluent with it. One of my worst nightmares is to write something that doesn’t seem authentic to a local.

The heart of the story is a young girl’s difficult and loving marriage to a much older man. Were you ever tempted to make didactical statements about the power dynamics involved?

I was much more inclined to present the facts and let readers infer the moral and ethical situation. Looking back, it was a very daring thing to start a story with, especially for western readers, who tend to struggle with that element. In the Kerala of the era I’m writing about, 12-year-olds often married 12-year-olds, entered another household, and were cared for and supervised by their mother-in-law, who became closer than their own mothers, because they didn’t really know them.

What was really daring was to get a 12-year-old to marry an older widower. I wanted to go against the grain and the reader’s expectation that this is going to be miserable — it ends up being rich and beautiful. I was inspired by the true story of my great-grandmother. She married an older widower, and by all accounts, they had the most wonderful, rich, funny and warm marriage. I liked [the idea of] surprising my readers, and had the confidence that it might happen, because I had a testimony.

Abraham Verghese’s book (Source: Amazon.in)

You have expressed admiration for minimalist writers like Somerset Maugham and maximalists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I found passages about the Scottish doctor less ornate than the ones about the bride’s family. Did you navigate those extremes in this book?

I wasn’t very conscious of it. That’s very astute, though. There are some places in the book where I could linger and some where I could get Faulknerian and rich and musical. As the novel went on and the characters collided, I became more conscious of the climax and how to attain a certain prevailing note or musical signature.

The story spans three generations, two continents, and a broad cast. How did you ensure the story didn’t get out of hand, turning into what Henry James called “loose, baggy monsters” of novels?

To be honest, it did get out of hand. It’s easy to go into long digressions which were sometimes hundreds of pages and months of work, only to realise that they weren’t the story. But it wasn’t hard to keep the characters intact. It was difficult to find out where it was all going. In medicine, I’ve enjoyed that view. In my lifetime, medicine has changed from a disease having no name to [being caused by] a molecular organism to having a treatment and being a thing of the past. I wanted to show a sweep of medical progress evolving with three generations.

Suddenly seeing the ending was a pivotal moment. Once I saw that halfway through the book, it became easier to go back and fix things. I’m blessed to have a great editor. Readers underestimate the role of the editor. In my view, editors should be on the book cover with the author. As the author, you lose all objectivity.

In the book, Europeans mingle with doctors, nurses and administrators in South India, across the 20th century. Colonialist guilt, class envy and cultural ignorance dominate these interactions. In your own experience that has been geographically diverse, has the perception of first world artists and scientists changed towards the so-called third world?

I’ve lived in many places. And Kerala has been very aware of the legacy of colonialism and casteism. We didn’t need colonials to lord it over us, we’d been doing it to our own people for a long time. In America, I arrived as a foreign medical graduate, and it was like being of a lower caste because one strata saw themselves as above another. People have asked whether I introduced western characters in the story to relate to western readers. But the Indian Medical Service was created by the British and a handful of Indian Licentiate Medical Practitioners. There were also Scottish and Swede people. It’s an accurate representation of the mix of people at the time.

Is it difficult for writers to publish long works today?

Covenant has a chequered publication history. I took a big advance from one publisher, and it was my mistake because I don’t perform well under the pressure of time. Eventually it became clear that my and their view of the novel was different. By that point, I’d invested 10 years into it, so I couldn’t let it be something that was a facsimile of what I had in my mind. I had no choice but to break with that publisher.

Now I had a tainted novel. People knew it had some trouble with that publisher, so they weren’t quite excited. But I was lucky to find Peter Blackstock, who published The Sympathiser and Shuggie Bain. Maybe because he’s a different type of editor who’s half-British, half-Indian, grew up in England, moved to America, he was more open about the length and not bothered by it. Bain was rejected by many publishers and finally came to him and became a classic and Booker winner.

Publishing can get orthodox and constrained. This is what’s happening in the business world in general. So the dictum appears that long novels are harder for readers. When Oprah picked it up, she checked the number of pages left because she didn’t want it to end. If you can create that effect, the reader paradoxically likes the length. It’s dicey. A big book on the shelf faces resistance and needs endorsements, which I luckily got. I hope we’ve broken a stale trend of slice-of-life novels.