Legend has it that Vikram Seth on a break while writing his dissertation, did a spot of bookstore crawling, chanced upon Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, got inspired and gave us ” The Golden Gate “. Just like that!!!

Just like that???  Does a novel in verse happen that easily???  It certainly reads like so.  We almost immediately get caught up in the lives of this group of friends, young-upwardly-mobile-professionals, the yuppies of the 80s.   The story of these self-absorbed, seemingly solvent types in San Francisco, wings you smoothly from sonnet to sonnet.  You get involved as much in their joys as in their anguish.  John’s loneliness which lead to his search for a partner,  Ed’s dilemma, Jan’s determination to make it in the world of art (pssst..Jan’s my favourite!), the priest’s wisdom, Liz, that lovely, brainy, unbending, hotshot lawyer, enigmatic Phil, and of course, the cats, Charlemange, Cuff and Link.   It makes you laugh as easily as it makes you want to cry.  You feel the anger, you feel the frustration, you feel with the characters and you feel for them.

Would one expect a novel in verse, all 590 stanzas of it in iambic tetrameter, to be so captivating?  I think Vikram Seth had his own fleeting moments of doubt too which he voices in an unexpected lull somewhere in the middle of the novel, when he suddenly

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