A fiction novel with not much 'fiction'. Review on Five Point Someone - Chetan Bhagat

"A little update: Now I know there is no such thing as a 'fiction novel'; a novel by definition is a work of fiction, so forgive me for that amateurish blunder."It all depends, doesn’t it? Though we rarely say it out loud – and we seldom define it concretely enough to ourselves either – we all have preconceived standards by which we judge books (or any work of art, for that matter). We all know what we are talking about when we call a book ‘good’ because we know, intrinsically, what parameters we are judging it by.

Needless to say, these are different for different people; some of us like science fiction while some cannot get their hands off romance, some of us prefer fast, racy thrillers while some like to be drawn slowly into a character, no matter how slow the story actually moves. But amid all these differences, there is one commonality. All of us like to be told stories that sound like our own. It makes us feel important enough to be written about, and I think that is where Chetan Bhagat, and consequently Five Point Someone, scores.

Let us get this straight and out of the way right at the beginning. Five Point Someone has a plot that is so flimsy you could knock it down with a strand of your hair. It purports to describe the lives of three students Hari, Alok and Ryan during their undergraduate years at IIT Delhi.

As you start reading the book, you keep waiting for the plot to appear, so to speak, but half-way through you give up, because by that time you will have realized it is not turning up. The book throws at you incident after incident after incident, all of them unconnected in every detail but one: they are all happening to the same set of characters. So you read about a ragging incident right at the beginning that you think will build up into something, but doesn’t. Then you read about a classroom incident which you think will act as a precursor to something more substantial, but doesn’t. Then you see Alok and Ryan split and you wonder if it will have any impact on the story, but it doesn’t. Then you just give up.

So how did a fiction novel do so well with such a blatant lack of a plot? The answer is as simple as it is logical – it banks on our vulnerability to nostalgia. At more than one point in this book, you will sigh reflectively and stare through the pages into your past and get lost in memories of your own experiences. And why not? Regardless of where we study, how many of us have not skipped lectures to watch movies? How many of us have not copied assignments? How many of us have not been average students? And still how many of us have not fallen in love? Just the fact that a book makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside about your ‘glory days’ doesn’t make it a good book; it just makes it a clever one, especially if that is all it does.

Another possible reason for the book’s resounding success is the general feeling of disquiet among students in general with regards to the IIT. They keep telling us they are the best, brightest brains in the country, that their ridiculously tough entrance exam is simply ‘their style’, and that they are proud of the high standards they set. Not surprisingly, most of us react to them the same way we react to arrogance anywhere else: we want to see the façade come down, we want to be told that the IIT is just another institution, that the students are just as human as you and me; we want the aura of perfection surrounding the institute destroyed - and so when one of their own paints a picture of the IIT (true or not) that makes it look just like any other college, we gobble it up voraciously.

You know the characterization has taken a nosedive when you see a book full of caricatures. Ryan is the typical rich kid with everything but his parents’ love and attention. Alok is the exact antithesis of Ryan, with a family to support and no source of income. Hari, by his own admission, is somewhere between the two. Professor Cherian is the bad professor who topped all his courses during his undergrad years and somehow cannot ever seem to smile. Add in a typically Indian ‘good girl’ in Neha and a flashback with a suicide and you begin to wonder if Chetan Bhagat is really bad at it or if he really could not be bothered. After all, you only need characters if you have a story to tell, which he did not.

The narrative, with no constraints like characterization and plot, flows smoothly with no glitches at all. In fact, the book reads like excerpts from someone’s diary most of the time, with some funny one-liners thrown in here and there. The language, deliberately designed to appeal to the youngsters I believe, was typically ‘collegeish’ with enough swear words sprinkled all over the place. This is probably the final nail in the coffin that leaves you with no doubt as to whom this book is targeted at. If you are the kind of person who loves to read books and reads them at every available opportunity, you will probably not like this one, because the gulf in quality between this and all the other books you have read before in your life will be too big to gloss over. But on the other hand, if you are the kind who likes a bit of light reading now and then and usually prefer magazines to books, I think this one will be for you. And judging by the sales of the book, you can tell which group makes up the majority!

Of course, my word is not gospel, and there might well be many among you who like Dickens as much as you liked Bhagat. To be honest, there were parts in the book where Bhagat showed glimpses of being good, but they were too far and fleeting in between. So for me, this was one of the worst fiction novels I have ever read, period. The reason? I will give you three. A fiction novel needs to come with a story. This one didn’t. A fiction novel has to showcase the author’s creative imagination. This one didn’t. And finally, a fiction novel needs to have some interesting characters. This one didn’t.