> Good, bad, indifferent?
I haven't read any of Mishra's fiction yet, enjoyed _End of Suffering_. I usually a fan of his detailed booko reviews in New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/authors/196). I heard mixed reviews about _The Romantics_. I was reading this article few days ago This where the authir analyzes Mishra and other Indian writers as new Orientalist:
Race & Class, Vol. 47, No. 4, 1-25 (2006) DOI: 10.1177/0306396806063855 Indo-Anglian fiction: the new Orientalism Anis Shivani
"By aggressively promoting Indian-English writers like Amit Chaudhuri, Pankaj Mishra and Manil Suri, the conglomerate publishing industry is engaging in the commodification of an exoticised Orientalism. The stereotype of Indians promoted by such works is of paralysed, fatalist characters, at sea in a world of hypermodernity. These novels reinforce westerners' impression of an Indian subcontinent untouched by globalisation, feminism, capitalism and individualism. They serve as armchair tourism, resorting to fetishised symbols of Indian culture
that the westerner feels at home in. The antidote to this 'boutique multiculturalism' is awareness of the fabric and texture of Indian life today, a living diversity played out in contesting realms of national and individual identity, often at sharp odds with the comforting notion of an unchanging India palatable to the bourgeois western reader."
--sharif -- Sharif Islam http://www.sharifislam.com