British author Aravind Adiga, who just released a new short-story collection called Between the Assassinations. (Simon & Schuster)

We first encounter Balram Halwai, the protagonist of Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008), in one of those nouveau riche palaces that dot India’s techno-capital, Bangalore. Balram is up late, composing the first in a series of letters to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is about to pay a visit to India to investigate why the country is so rich in men like Balram.

Western critics have anointed Adiga as the pre-eminent chronicler of modern-day India. But readers should be wary of the crown.

The White Tiger follows Balram’s Dickensian rise — with shades of Patricia Highsmith — from low-caste rags to entrepreneurial riches. Sex, drink, drugs, murder, outsourcing. Welcome to the New India.

About three-quarters of the way through the novel, the reader stumbles upon the following passage:

Now, Mr. Premier, every day thousands of foreigners fly into my country for enlightenment. They go to the Himalayas, or to Benaras, or to Bodh Gaya. They get into weird poses of yoga, smoke hashish, shag a sadhu or two, and think they’re getting enlightened.

Ha!

This, it turns out, is Mr. Adiga’s raison d’être. He is intent on exposing the misconceptions of modern India, tearing through the spangled saris of bubblegum Bollywood, guiding us to the filthy gravamen of the country’s love affair with capitalism, poking at the soft underbelly of liberal assumptions.

Unwilling to accept a fate of eternal servitude, Balram Halwai chooses to remake his destiny, just as India has – with the crude tools of hyper-capitalism. But one will not find his recipe for success in an MBA textbook: Balram ends up murdering his employer and stealing a bag of money that was meant as a bribe for rotten politicians.

(Simon & Schuster)

Adiga has just released a followup, Between the Assassinations, a collection of stories set in the coastal city of Kittar. These 14 stories take place in the bloody seven-year parenthesis between the murders of Indian prime ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. The tales involve a Muslim urchin who is drafted into a terrorist attack; a bookseller beaten for selling Salman Rushdie’s controversial book The Satanic Verses; a low-caste school boy who detonates a bomb in a chemistry class to avenge a lifetime of slights; and a schoolmaster who cannot hold back the tide of corruption sweeping over his students.

Judging by his literary output thus far, Adiga seems intent on assuring us that the rising powers of the East, while they may outdo us in GDP growth, cannot compete in terms of overall happiness. “Some of the most acute social criticism yet made of the Indian middle class,” gushed Nakul Krishna in his review of The White Tiger in The New Statesman, presumably referring to Adiga’s portrayal of Mr. Ashok, Balram’s dashing but weak-kneed employer. Both The White Tiger and Between the Assassinations suggest that to get ahead, the poor of India need to step over the corpses of parvenus, sacrificing both family and their souls in the process.

For this, Western literary critics have anointed Adiga as the pre-eminent chronicler of modern-day India. But readers should be wary of the crown.

Raised in Australia, Adiga is an alumnus of Columbia and Oxford. Until he cashed his Booker cheque, he was a Time correspondent working in Mumbai, the city of his birth. Posing as a social realist against the magical realism of fellow Indian authors Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy, Adiga presents a version of upstairs/downstairs strife ramped up for the 21st century. This authenticity manifests itself most plainly in Balram’s first-person narration.

Adiga conjures Balram with an en vogue literary device: the faux-naïve narrator. The device seems less like a vehicle to deliver the internal life of a character than a MacGuffin that allows Adiga all sorts of intellectual drift — because, after all, Balram said it! When Balram, an uneducated, barely literate rube who doesn’t speak English, drops terms like “enigmatic” and “oleaginous,” one gets wary. What’s more, in his attempt to educate his reader on the local political morass, Adiga uses expository dialogue that presents an uncomplicated, Manichean version of India that can’t belong to anyone but Adiga himself.

The White Tiger is a dark thriller-comedy with social commentary. But for a book that wants to drag its readers through the muck of social and political degradation, it is as easy to swallow as a mild veggie thali. Adiga was presumably aware of this paradox while writing Between the Assassinations. As serious as a funeral, the stories are spaced over a six-day walking tour of the city of Kittar. We crawl slowly through the sewage of a city trapped between the Stone Age and the Information Age, and meet a range of characters who represent the broadest possible sweep of the city’s inhabitants. Kittar, it shortly becomes clear, is a metaphor for India.

Adiga poses with the 2008 Man Booker Prize in London after receiving the award for his book The White Tiger. (Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images)

Between the Assassinations is a work of admirable research and genuine social curiosity. Adiga is a keen observer of the lives of the poor and takes note of the seemingly trivial, like the old servant woman who rubs a well-worn idol of the goddess Krishna, or the way a cycle rickshaw driver’s chain creaks with rust and wear. At its best, Beyond the Assassinations resembles filmmaker Satyagit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy, which so brilliantly explored India’s post-partition malaise. But it still can’t escape Adiga’s penchant for irony and overstatement.

Adiga does not ask us to search too hard for symbols and delivers them via every piece of ordnance in the postmodern fiction arsenal (irreverent lists, winking self-awareness, arch skepticism), coupled with some of the old tropes that an Indian writer must employ (sing-song sentences, an overabundance of exclamation points) in order to convince us that he is, indeed, writing about India.

While a reader can’t help but be impressed with Adiga’s outrage at India’s separation between rich and poor, his work never reaches the heights of his professed influences: Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son. In part, it’s because he does not have their literary acumen — nowhere in Adiga’s writing do we come across a particularly sharp sentence or an image as resonant as Ellison’s unnamed black protagonist sitting in a basement illuminated by ever-burning lightbulbs.

But it’s also because Adiga is indignant in the way of a middle-class activist. It shouldn’t matter that he writes about poverty without having experienced it himself — this never hurt Tolstoy or Faulkner. It’s a question of his artistic choices: Adiga so distrusts his reader that he feels the need to jam us repeatedly with the obvious.

If Adiga’s intention is to get foreigners to at least consider Indian poverty between bouts of yoga and sadhu-shagging, I suppose he’s done his job. But if his aim is a lasting body of social realist literature, well, we may think we’re getting enlightened, but we’re just being entertained. There’s a way to bridge the two — Adiga has yet to find it.

Between the Assassinations is in stores now.

Richard Poplak is a writer based in Toronto and the author of The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World.