 In the west , Narayan 's simplicity of writing was well received . One of his biographers , William Walsh , wrote of his narrative as a comedic art with an inclusive vision informed by the transience and illusion of human action . Multiple Booker nominee Anita Desai classes his writings as " compassionate realism " where the cardinal sins are unkindness and immodesty . According to Wyatt Mason , in Narayan 's works , the individual is not a private entity , but rather a public one and this concept is an innovation that can be called his own . In addition to his early works being among the most important English @-@ language fiction from India , with this innovation , he provided his western readers the first works in English to be infused with an eastern and Hindu existential perspective . Mason also holds the view that Edmund Wilson 's assessment of Walt Whitman , " He does not write editorials on events but describes his actual feelings " , applies equally to Narayan . 
