The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
336pp, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

This impressive novel, longlisted for the Man Booker prize, produces a strange effect. It is a big novel that stretches from India to New York; an ambitious novel that reaches into the lives of the middle class and the very poor; an exuberantly written novel that mixes colloquial and more literary styles; and yet it communicates nothing so much as how impossible it is to live a big, ambitious, exuberant life. Everything about it dramatises the fact that although we live in this mixed-up, messy, globalised world, for many people the dominant response is fear of change, based on a deep desire for security.

The Inheritance of Loss is set in the Himalayas, "where India blurred into Bhutan and Sikkim ... it had always been a messy map". A young Indian girl, Sai, lives with her grandfather, a retired judge, in a damp and crumbling house. Sai has started a relationship with her Nepalese maths tutor, Gyan. But, unknown to her, Gyan has become seduced by a group of Nepalese insurgents, some of whom are, as the book opens, marching to Sai's house to steal food, Pond's Cold Cream, Grand Marnier, and her grandfather's old rifles.

This incident makes up the first, grim chapter of the book. There is something about Desai's description that touches on humour, and yet it is much too painful to be funny. Even the judge's dog is wrong-footed in the encounter: "Mutt began to do what she always did when she met strangers: she turned a furiously wagging bottom to the intruders and looked around from behind, smiling, conveying both shyness and hope." The judge is so deeply humiliated by having to prepare tea for the intruders that Sai has to pretend not to see what has happened. "Both Sai and the cook had averted their gaze from the judge and his humiliation ... it was an awful thing, the downing of a proud man. He might kill the witness."

After setting the scene with a moment of such high drama, Desai shows how the lives of Gyan and Sai and her grandfather, along with their cook and his son, intertwine before and after this horrible turning point. She casts her net wide, and scenes in which the cook's son, Biju, tries to make a life in the US are paralleled by the judge's experience studying in England in the 1940s. In both situations, we see a young Indian man setting off full of idealism about the cultural and material opportunities of the west, only to find himself ground down by the reality of being a second-class citizen.

So we hear about the judge as a young man, alienated by the coldness of Cambridge society. "Despite his attempts to hide, he merely emphasised something that unsettled others. For entire days nobody spoke to him at all ... elderly ladies ... moved over when he sat next to them in the bus, so he knew that whatever they had, they were secure in their conviction that it wasn't even remotely as bad as what he had." We hear about the young Biju, working in filthy restaurants for exploitative employers, drifting from job to job, and then "Slipping out and back on the street. It was horrible what happened to Indians abroad and nobody knew but other Indians abroad. It was a dirty little rodent secret."

The only time this atmosphere of loss and displacement lifts is in the scenes where Sai begins to fall in love with Gyan. Here, Desai's prose becomes marvellously flexible, sometimes almost too jumpy and uncontrolled, but always pulsing with energy. "Her ears she displayed like items taken from under the counter and put before a discerning customer in one of the town's curio shops, but when he tried to test the depth of her eyes with his, her glance proved too slippery to hold; he picked it up and dropped it, retrieved it, dropped it again until it slid away and hid." Sadly, their love dies when Gyan joins the insurgents and stops coming to see Sai. Sai eventually goes to confront him, but the encounter ends in disappointment. Gyan thinks to himself as she leaves: "Sai was not miraculous; she was an uninspiring person, a reflection of all the contradictions around her."

If we were in the world of Salman Rushdie, then Gyan and Sai would achieve a sensual communion that would stand against all the misunderstandings of ethnic and political and class hatreds. But the point of this novel, constantly brought home to us in small and big ways, is how individuals are always failing to communicate. Desai flicks from a failed telephone call to a failed marriage, a lost dog to lost parents, and the cumulative experience is of atomisation and thwarted yearning. I think this constant sense of disappointment is the reason why, although I admired this novel, I can't say I loved it. It's not surprising that Desai's characters occasionally refer to VS Naipaul, who has something of the same chastened view about the possibility of emotional fulfilment.

The only emotional connection that endures is that between the cook and his son, and even this is so uncertain, despite a momentarily hopeful ending, that it hardly lightens the book. Otherwise, we are left with Sai, and her sense, which is also the sensation experienced by the reader, of being battered by overlapping stories that drown out her own desire for the reassurance of love: "Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny happiness and live safely within it."

· Natasha Walter's The New Feminism is published by Virago.