[...] Chaudhuri’s antinarrative miniaturism (as per Hilary Mantel), his interest in modest worldliness and the domestic life of a city, won a select but influential cast of admirers, huddled together against the backdrop of the 1990s postmodern resuscitation of narrative. But as Coe’s phrasing suggests (“in that respect”), critics were also left wanting, or just bemused. They would praise the work for one or two thousand words and then, at the review’s end, start peering around the corner, as if suspecting they might have been waiting in the wrong room. The novels were delightful, but slight; elegant, but chilly; arrestingly plotless, but finally still plotless. Chaudhuri’s position solidified. He was a virtuoso of a minor literature, absorbed in the autumnal practice of recording the quiet pleasures of the small and the passed-over and the modern. The world inside, and out, of the bourgeois apartment. A fading afternoon in a past Calcutta, outmoded by globalization.

Chaudhuri’s opening to an essay in his new collection, The Origins of Dislike (2018), limns well the sort of thinly conscious generalized bias his modernism had to work against.

the senescence of these globalized cultural paragons, once pulsing with heroic narrative optimism, gave way to a range of wandering, antispectacular, patient vogues