Love, Stars, and All That

Narayan's accomplished first novel is a charmer. Opening in Berkeley, Calif., but alternating regularly between America and India, the story follows young Indian-born Gita Das as she ascends rungs of the American ladder of success while also feeling the contrary tugs of her first culture. The rungs: scholarship (Gita is a gifted graduate student); love (she is a novice); and the adamant mystery of identity in a world where family and friends clamor for dominance. The novel is comic and earnest, including wonderfully vivid mockery of American and Indian academics, all but drowned by ego and high theory; the pitfalls of college towns' ``alternative'' pretenses; and the contrivances of elite society generally (her send-up of a ``postbeat'' American poet is pleasingly ruthless). But Narayan's wit is matched by the warmth in her portrayals of individuals and their complicated helter-skelter kinships at home and abroad. Only the victorious ending seems seems a bit willed. Narayan, an anthropologist and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is also the author of Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching , which won the 1990 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing. (Feb.)