A Bad Character

“A dark, hypnotic story of a young woman’s coming of age in a Delhi that's both changing before her eyes, and yet not changing fast enough to save her.” —Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life 

“India has always enjoyed a rich, revolutionary, and independent press and a literary heritage that has often come to blows with governments over perceived attacks on politicians and their programs. Writers often have to take tremendous risks because of fear of retribution. So to read A Bad Character and revel in its stunning realism about the life of a 20-something woman is to accept that Kapoor’s point of view is not often heard, and that her frank descriptions take determination. Her tale involves a young woman who is navigating life as an orphan and a college student living with her aunt and uncle. But this is not a coming-of-age story in any traditional sense: this is a deep, intense narrative of a woman who feels that she does not belong anywhere until she meets a man who changes her mind, body, and soul . . . This is a story about being a woman, but it’s also about being a woman in India. The narrator’s attempts at meeting good Indian boys to placate her aunt could be vehicles for laughter, if there wasn’t so much sadness: how do these young Indians, in and out of country, play this matrimonial game year after year? The format may have changed with the advent of the Internet, but the rules are the same, and Kapoor magnificently captures it all. She describes India in a way that few writers have ever done, interfusing her observations with vivid portrayals of sights, smells, sounds, and feelings. Kapoor’s picture of India is one that no one has the guts to do anymore. A Bad Character is a book of courage. I have only read a handful of books in my lifetime that have left me feeling eviscerated. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance comes to mind, but A Bad Character is bleak in a different way, as it portrays the loss of innocence of a generation that is often blamed for not having gone through the hardships of previous generations. Yet the pain is real. An excellent book.” —Shyam K. Sriram, PopMatters

“Exquisite, lyrical . . . There is more than one bad character in this darkly beautiful novel: the term could equally be applied to the city that forms its backdrop, as well as the love interest to which it ostensibly refers . . . Kapoor [creates] nuanced and beautiful prose, often from the simplest of words.” —Jane Wallace, Asian Review of Books
 
“Captivating . . . A Bad Character echoes Nabokov’s Lolita with a story about the sexual initiation of a young woman, but offers a female perspective, one that doesn’t pull any punches. The narrator burns with a longing that comes from being abandoned by her past and yet unclaimed by her future—a future whose only possibility seems to hinge on her marriageability. That’s where he, the ‘Bad Character,’ finds her—waiting desperately for someone to bring her into the world, into the present . . . Delhi is a character in this love story, and in my opinion, the main character . . . Kapoor has a bold, lyrical style. A Bad Character haunts you and leaves you changed because in such places love and hate, life and death, salvation and destruction are thrown so close together so as to be indistinguishable . . . It sheds light on the profound and mundane ways that sexual violence circumscribes the lives of women. Literary voices like Kapoor’s, and books like A Bad Character, are now more crucial than ever.” —Kavita Das, The Rumpus
 
“Searing, intoxicating . . . typical romance this is not. I read A Bad Character in one frantic sitting. The narrator, a woman ready to defy societal conventions, kept me on the line. In a voice that flits between excess and restraint, she recounts her brief affair with a nameless lover, a relationship [that] merely bolsters an extant self-possession. Her well-to-do family desperately wants her to marry; she seeks a life on her own terms. Kapoor captures a vision of Delhi—fetid, fast and ashy—but the city provides the ink, not the language, of the story. Instead, A Bad Character tackles a more universal theme of female desire—inclusive of but not restricted to the erotic; here is the story of a young woman’s hunger to be free. But for any woman to possess and understand herself in a conservative society, expectations and traditions must die. Fittingly, bodies are set aflame.” —Catherine Lacey, The New York Times Book Review

“Stunning . . . A masterful debut that should not be missed: the sort of book that few authors are able to write as their first novel. The story explores identity, sexuality, rebellion, and life lived outside the lines in 21st century Delhi, and is sure to captivate readers everywhere. From the first line, the book’s intimate tone and star confidence is sure to draw audiences in. It traces the intoxicating and fraught love affair between the narrator and a man she meets in a cafe in Delhi.  The story is held together seemingly effortlessly by the prose, which manages to be both melancholy and uplifting, captivating and haunting—the author convey[s] a sense of charged beauty . . . It’s a meditative portrait not just of a turbulent relationship, but also touches on issues of class, race, and religious divides, though it focuses on the intimate and personal story of a single young woman attempting to navigate tradition and modernity, change and expectation. A memorable story from a new talent.” —Emma Cueto, Bustle
 
“Marguerite Duras meets new India in A Bad Character, the vividly imagined tale of a Delhi college student who shrugs off middle-class expectations with the help of a dangerously unsuitable lover.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue
 
“India, once again. Its dark underbelly—flashing images of poverty and squalor, corruption and drugs and, above all, battered lives . . . Here’s a young woman, named Deepti Kapoor, picking up where the others have left off, adding something here (a female protagonist), subtracting something there (sentiment), splashing into our lives like the beginning of the monsoon hitting Delhi’s streets. And the irony of it all? By the last page you have to ask yourself who is the bad character of her title: the unnamed female narrator, or the man whose life she believes she has unpacked so carefully . . . A Bad Character probes us to ask how cities impact the lives of their denizens, especially the restless youth who refuse to live the lives their elders demand of them. An accomplished novel.” —Charles R. Larson, Counterpunch
 
“Mesmerizing. Set against the backdrop of the gritty cultural and societal topography of India, our unnamed subject is aware of what she's doing. Spending time with a man whom she believes is beneath her because of his looks and the color of his skin, her expectations of him and of herself as she is with him are challenged. Theirs starts out a relatively innocuous, innocent relationship. But before long it all speeds up, as he challenges her in ways neither good nor productive. As the relationship ignites, Kapoor keeps us engaged both via its events and her language. This isn't a love story. This isn't a romance. This is the story of a young woman trying to find her place in a world that doesn't feel quite her own, struggling to solidify her persona and personality . . . A wholly original debut, marking the arrival of an author who has mastered the beauty and poetry in that which is uglier than much of what any of us will ever come to experience.” —Kristin Fritz, Everyday eBook 

“Vivid . . . A fiery, incandescent debut [that] artfully captures the perilous desires of a woman alone in New Delhi. Kapoor’s novel smolders with submerged rage, pain, abandonment and erotic desire; it’s a paean to a relationship already in ashes, and to a beloved now gone beyond recovery . . . Her sudden, intense romance both assuages her fear of disconnection and exacerbates her tendency toward it . . . In the man she meets in a coffee shop, she finds freedom from the need to conform and to cater to familial and social demands. With him, her eccentricities finally seem valuable rather than contemptible . . . The great strength and vitality of Kapoor’s novel lies in the episodic, mercurial narration; her writing has the flexible, lyrical cadence of a prose poem, flitting lightly from scene to scene to scene in a matter of sentences. This artful rendering of her narrator’s psyche allows her to make striking juxtapositions that gracefully elicit her recurrent motifs and underlying themes . . . Her blunt, searing language is at its most compelling in these brief, scattered glimpses. A Bad Character is a powerful, psychologically acute, elegantly crafted debut that promises great things to come from Kapoor.” —Claire Fallon, The Huffington Post
 
“The most intriguing release of the winter. In A Bad Character, a 20-year-old woman—a restless member of New Delhi’s middle class—enters into a deleterious relationship with an intense and disaffected man. It’s a novel of sex, drugs, and keen perceptions chiseled into shape by Kapoor’s vivid and plainspoken prose . . . This is a fiction concerned with the peculiarity of having one’s basic needs met, and desiring strange and dangerous things.” —Drew Cohen, Vegas Seven
 
“An excellent novel of place [and] a tale about the doomed love affair between the narrator, an educated girl with good marriage prospects, and her rebellious boyfriend. Scarcely an older story exists in all literature—the couple are unnamed but you may as well call them Romeo and Juliet—yet Kapoor slaps it into refreshed life with the vehemence and sculpted power of her writing. The couple’s courtship takes the narrator into corners of Delhi she never saw from the confines of her ‘vacuumed life,’ and Kapoor gives us piercing glimpses of slums, roadside restaurants, Sufi shrines, heroin dens hidden in the backpacker district, desert outskirts where luxury apartments are being erected, and the noisy, thronging bazaar in the old city . . . As Delhi transforms from a well-appointed prison into a ‘carnivalesque world’ and the narrator definitively crosses out of respectable society, her boyfriend succumbs to a frenzy of self-destruction. Kapoor depicts that implosion without padding or consolation. She writes with a keening, furious sorrow that rang in my ears well after I finished the book.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Riveting . . . Kapoor’s debut novel is a coming-of-age tale as complex, gritty and frankly terrifying as Delhi, the city that forms its backdrop. A 19-year-old college student leads a relatively unexciting life in Delhi, where her father sent her to live with a wealthy aunt after the death of her mother and his own absconding to Singapore. It’s here, in the city of her exile, that she meets her nameless boyfriend: American-accented and charismatic—we’re told from the beginning that he dies by her 21st birthday; she becomes addicted to him and his doomed promises of adventure. The non-linear story takes cues from moody European New Wave cinema and Baudelaireian prose poetry, but its mongrel influences makes for a cohesive, and thoroughly modern, tale.” —Caroline Goldstein, Bustle, January 2015’s Best Books to Help You Start the New Year On the Right Literary Foot
 
“The narrator of Kapoor’s debut novel is young and middle-class. Her car allows a measure of freedom, but not enough, and when she meets a somewhat unsuitable older man, the temptation to capsize her life with an affair is irresistible. Both a coming-of-age story and a portrait of New Delhi.” —The Millions Most Anticipated: Great 2015 Book Preview

“Riveting . . . Kapoor’s debut follows a young woman’s personal journey amid the shifting, often gritty landscape of modern-day Delhi. At a café one day, the beautiful 20-year-old protagonist—a self-described loner—is approached by an unnamed man to whom she is inexplicably drawn despite his unattractive physical features. Thus sparks an intense, at times discomfiting relationship that begins to pull the narrator away from her conventional life, as she becomes increasingly exposed and lured to the darker recesses of the city and its inhabitants. An intimate, raw exploration of [a] profound transformation.” —Leah Strauss, Booklist
 
“Haunting . . . a beguiling, hallucinatory experience, at once unsettling and intimate. This is a novel about sexuality and escape, belonging and emptiness. It is about a man and woman who drive around the intestines of Delhi—eating, making love, falling apart. It is also about disenfranchisement, about how a woman might feel in Delhi regardless of her privilege or access. A Bad Character is an astounding book: read it with the scent of diesel in your nostrils and red dust in your mouth.” —Tishani Doshi, The New Indian Express

“A tightly rendered story of a young woman’s awakening in contemporary India. The unnamed female narrator, ‘twenty and untouched’ when her mother dies, is sent by her absentee father to live with a relative in a modest Delhi apartment. One day she meets a rich, rebellious, darker-skinned young man from a different social class and subsequently begins a torrid affair with him. In clipped, haunting paragraphs, she tells of her discovery of a gritty, thrilling India that she never knew existed. The tension that the affair will be exposed becomes almost unbearable. [But] Kapoor takes the story in darker and tragic directions [even as] the prose becomes more ruminative and elliptical. The story and the style are reminiscent of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, but when fused with the vivid Delhi scenes, Kapoor’s novel ventures into exciting and original territory.” —Publishers Weekly

“The meeting between a restless young woman and a manipulative, worldly man in Delhi ignites a volatile, ill-fated love story. The nameless female narrator meets a man in a café. Ugly he may be, and a liar too, it emerges, but the man knows Delhi inside out, has wealth, confidence and a wild streak, and woos her slowly but thoroughly. Kapoor boosts her slender coming-of-age story with flashes of Delhi in 2000, a place of economic ferment in some quarters, while elsewhere, the teeming centuries-old ways continue. This novel is at its most impressive in its evocation of a dazzling, dangerous cityscape.” —Kirkus

“A stylishly written, powerfully moving love story, set against the bleak beauty and baroque decay of 21st century Delhi—its rubble, construction sites, wastelands, and the poisoned ooze of its dead river.  What Twilight in Delhi is to the 20th century Indian novel, A Bad Character is to the 21st: the essence of India’s corrupt capital, brilliantly and darkly distilled. This is a remarkable debut from a major new talent.” —William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal
 
“A tour de force . . . The phrase ‘bad character’ is an Indian way of describing moral depravity. It suggests a way of life frowned upon by society . . . In s...