India, May 30 -- Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but when a writer connects a character's inner life with broader social forces that mirror it, a single house can reveal an entire country. We see this dynamic in Akhil Sharma's An Obedient Father (2000). Set against the backdrop of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, it shows how a Delhi bureaucrat's domestic abuse echoes the corruption of the state. Similarly, in Karan Mahajan's bleak and accomplished new novel, The Complex, family dysfunction reflects the state of the nation. There's a small suggestion of this in the title itself: the main characters live in an old New Delhi housing complex and, more than once, their nature is described as "complexed". The author's earlier work, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), dealt with the aftermath of a blast in a New Delhi market. Here, he does the opposite: he shows how the accretion of moral rot leads to life-defining circumstances. The cast of characters isn't sprawling but is substantial. The Complex revolves around the surviving members of the family of the late SP Chopra who, we are told, was a framer of India's Constitution and a former Reserve Bank governor. The descendants of his six sons now occupy separate flats in the residential enclave that serves as the novel's primary setting over the years. Not all members of the family are given equal emphasis. Mahajan focuses on Laxman, the youngest son, as though to indicate the distance between the patriarch's vision and that of the next generation. He explores the shifting tides in the lives of Laxman's nephews, Sachin and Brij, and their wives, Gita and Karishma. Other characters, such as Vibha, Laxman's elder sister, play significant roles. (Thank goodness the book includes a family tree.) Before circling back to the New Delhi complex, the narrative follows Gita and her packaging engineer husband Sachin to the US, to establish an adjacent concern: the friction of immigrant assimilation and the pull of the homeland. Mahajan skilfully explores the impact of a traumatic incident on Gita and her relationship with Sachin, and goes on to interweave the mindset and motivations of the other characters. The members of the Chopra family aren't given to empathy or nuance, and there's "a menu of idiosyncrasies and dysfunctions to choose from". Mahajan conveys this in many ways, from their eating habits and fractured domestic lives to their callous treatment of others. The feckless Laxman drifts from his "piddly women's bobby pin factory" to manage a temple trust and then set up an Ayurvedic balms enterprise. Finally, after the anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhi's assassination, he joins a political party, where his talent for opportunism turns him into a political henchman. Behind closed doors, he also embarks on an affair with a member of the family. Despite the events unfolding in Indian politics at the time, the real shifts, he feels, are happening in his personal realm: "an individual rotation of stars that would, by affecting him, possibly also affect political matters". Gita sees this self-absorbed realisation more clearly. "How had the worst person in the family become its doyen?" she thinks. "Or was this the fate of all groups? That power accrued to the person with the most energy, regardless of whether that energy was good or evil?" The challenge that Mahajan sets himself is to enter the mind of this unpleasant character and show us what propels him. The reader is initially tempted to hold Laxman at arm's length; as the novel proceeds, his self-justifying actions remain inexcusable but one comes to realise how self-pity, among other qualities, can blind a person. Early on, we're told: "Say what you would about Laxman Chacha, but he had been exactly what he appeared to be. There was no artifice. He saw the world and he took and took. He never apologised." The novel also features a "hidden narrator" who brings us the story, a narrative that is further extended by Mahajan, as he informs us in his Afterword. These metafictional devices seem unnecessary. Mahajan has sufficient control of character and atmosphere to make the novel work without them. By the end, the housing enclave can be viewed as "a dry bed of pettiness, meanness, violence, squalor". The Complex reminds us that cruel appetites and private compromises do not remain constrained within narrow domestic walls....