Stephen Alter is 21 years old, just out of Yale, and his first published novel strolls with the kind of sweet prose most fiction writers never get near. Like most writers he has structural problems, and he goes overboard sometimes, but this kid has written one hell of a good book.

Neglected Lives starts badly, but the persistent reader will be oddly charmed as the individual plot strands begin to weave together, strangely at first, glancing off and crossing each other in deep and surprising ways.

The book takes place in India, where Alter grew up (although he went west for his education). The protagonist, not surprisingly a young man, comes from that hybridization of Englishmen and Hindustani that Georg Orwell described so brilliantly 35 years ago. Alter's hero feels a similar sense of class and cultural instability as those Orwell less charitably referred to as half-breeds. At the start of the book he seduces a young Hindu woman, is caught and beaten to a mild pulp by her rather boorish brothers, and banished by his embarrassed family to the hinterlands. At this point the book begins to pick up in quality while maintaining its rather laconic tempo.

The poor slob gets sent to stay with his parents' old buddies, a retired half-English, half-Indian general and his alkie wife, residents of a mostly deserted colonial outpost. The main activity there consists of drinking and watching the jungle reclaim the cottages. Naturally, this, uh, bucolic setting provides time for a lot of introspection, which is what just about everybody does. All of the characters involved get their chance to spin out brief but revealing vignettes about their various problems--sexual, social, existential. Here Alter really struts his stuff; the excellent vignettes display versatility that a young novelist, by rights, should not yet have. He uses multiple perspectives of the same event has a Faulknerian ring.

Neglected Lives even has a point to it. The title refers to all of the characters and their sadly solitary lives--each one is enveloped in a cocoon of lonliness, from the crazed general who spends his days shooting monkeys who make forays into his orchard to the old hermit having the life sucked out of him in a house infested with leeches. The characters trapped in the jungle village dream of escape from their solitude, but the city-dwellers are no better off.

Alter is best at creating an atmosphere for the seemingly epiphanal moments in the book. The only difficulty is that these moments, when they finally occur, do not always fulfill the promise of their set-ups. For example, a fat man determines to lose a lot of weight, once and for all, and let his slothful habits fall by the wayside. The description of his decision and the absurd steps he takes are fine, but after he gets all cranked up, he simply and predictably caves in again. These trivial moments of neo-existential despair wear kind of thin. Alter's prose, given to somewhat untailored lushness, merges with the decidedly out-of-the mainstream setting to produce an interesting novel that doesn't always have a whole lot under the surface. But the threadbare spots in his carefully woven story get by on the strength of the writing alone.

Neglected Lives may mark the arrival of a strong new force in fiction; still, it remains to be seen whether Alter can break out of the ultimately constraining parameters of trying to write the Great Indian Novel. For the present, however, Neglected Lives is a fine first novel, and the only thing a similarly-aged writer can do is be admiringly jealous.