Arundhati Roy's second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was published in 2017, twenty years after the appearance of her first novel, The God of Small Things. Despite some thematic continuities between the two novels, there are also significant narrative differences that can be attributed to Roy's evolving socio-political consciousness (elaborated in her large body of essays and commentaries), but also to what might be seen as a changing view of humanity and human society post-9/11. What comes to prominence in the later novel is a concern with the individual subject as a site of surveillance, rumors, reports, and (dis)information—what, following the novel itself, we can collectively call "data"—and a corresponding novel form which relies on textual bricolage and narrative fragmentation. "Data," in this sense, is the expression of a social sensibility that stems from the trauma of loss and the absurdity of geopolitics post-9/11—and, in Roy's vision, how this absurdity plays out in the context of India under Narendra Modi. In its formal evocation of this traumatic milieu, the novel—embodying the dilemma facing the 9/11 novel—may ultimately reinscribe and reinforce the fragmentary identity and disjointed knowledge that it critiques.

阿隆达蒂·罗伊（Arundhati Roy）的第二部长篇小说《最幸福的部》于2017年出版，距她的第一部小说《小物之神》（The God of Small Things）出现已有二十年了。。尽管这两部小说在主题上有一定的连续性，但在叙事上也存在重大差异，这可以归因于罗伊（Roy）不断发展的社会政治意识（在她大量的论文和评论中都有阐述），也可以归因于人们对罗伊（Ray）的看法的变化。 9/11后的人类与人类社会。在后来的小说中引起人们关注的是作为一个监视，谣言，报道和（虚假）信息的站点的个体主题的关注-在小说本身之后，我们可以统称为“数据”-以及一本相应的小说形式依赖于文本的词缀和叙事碎片。从这个意义上说，“数据”是一种社会敏感性的表达，其源于9/11之后的损失和地缘政治的荒诞-在罗伊看来，在Narendra Modi领导下的印度背景下，这种荒唐行为是如何发生的。在正式唤起这种令人痛苦的环境时，这部小说体现了9/11小说所面临的困境，最终可能会重新刻画并加强其批判性的零散身份和脱节知识。