Aravind Adiga’s debut novel, The White Tiger, portrays India as a place that “has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality.” It is not a place where village life, often exalted in Indian literature, is built upon family unity, but a place where parents don’t bother to name their children. Mr. Adiga’s is an India where votes are bought and elections are fixed, where never-ending bribes are packed in expensive Italian handbags, and where working “with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication and insincerity” leads to enrichment and success.

The White Tiger is narrated by Balram Halwai, son of a bicycle rickshaw driver from Laxmangarh, a small village in the desert state of Rajasthan. Halwai is a man who manages to escape “my caste—my destiny,” first by lying and begging his way into a job as a rich man’s driver. Halwai and his wealthy master Ashok soon relocate to Gurgaon—one of Delhi’s exploding satellite cities—so that Ashok can be closer to the government officials he must regularly bribe to keep the family business humming. It’s in India’s capital that Halwai’s bitterness and deceit grow as he witnesses up close the chasm between India’s corrupt urban rich and its destitute masses.

Fueled by his resentment, Halwai begins siphoning petrol and skimming off the top of his master’s car repair payments. Soon enough, he graduates to the theft of 700,000 rupees from Ashok, a premeditated robbery that requires a calculated and remorseless murder of the man he calls “a kind of second father.” It is also a crime for which Halwai’s family will almost certainly be killed, tortured or defamed in retribution. Halwai flees south and after a host of bribes to the police, achieves the Indian entrepreneur’s dream: ownership of a successful and profitable business in Bangalore.

Halwai’s success is predicated on his rejection of a system of forced morality and leveraged subservience that cages India’s poor in what Halwai calls “the Rooster Coop.” The Rooster Coop secures its prisoners’ loyalty and acceptance of demeaning servitude by promising that any cooped man who tries to advance in station through disloyalty to his master will see his family punished—that family unit which is often fatuously described, as Mr. Adiga writes, as “the pride and glory of our nation, the repository of all our love and sacrifice.” So deeply ingrained is this lie, Halwai says, “that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse,” because only a man “prepared to see his family destroyed—hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters—can break out of the coop.”

Halwai is such a man, and dooms his family without any apparent regret, and without receiving any comeuppance. The ugly and unpunished nature of Halwai’s rise provides an extreme example of how many have achieved success in India. Mr. Adiga also examines the corruption and bribery that often seem intractable parts of the Indian system. While his study of this last topic is cursory at best, he at least names a sad reality that nearly all Indians are aware of, though few speak out against. Such studies in the darker side of modern India are too often glossed over in literature and nonfiction alike.

There is much to celebrate about India’s ascendance, from its ballooning middle class to its technological prowess. Yet, as Mr. Adiga reminds us, we should not forget the means that have achieved many of these ends. While Halwai’s murder of Ashok is perhaps an extreme example, crime and corruption are often at least suspected of playing a part in many real-life Indian rags-to-riches tales. Consider Dhirubhai Ambani, deceased founder of the much-heralded Reliance Industries (which is now split between his sons, who are each among India’s richest men). Ambani, the son of a rural schoolteacher, rose from nothing to create one of the greatest economic powerhouses in India’s history. While two decades ago suspected bribe-paying and rule-bending that fueled Reliance’s rise were deeply explored in the foreign press, rarely does any current discussion of Reliance mention the empire’s shady roots. Mr. Adiga’s greatest victory in The White Tiger is the crackling way he evinces India’s uglier, grittier side, something few authors have done of late.

But in the end, Mr. Adiga’s ambition exceeds his abilities as a writer. The White Tiger includes several small but distracting unbelievable plot contrivances, a number of tired clichés and clumsy symbols, and too many words like “oleaginous,” which jarringly break the otherwise consistently sarcastic chirp of Mr. Adiga’s barely educated narrator.

Perhaps most glaringly, The White Tiger takes the narrative form of a letter composed over seven nights by its morally backward narrator to a Chinese premier scheduled to visit India to learn “the truth about Bangalore.” Halwai’s purported motive in hastily composing this missive is to show the Chinese premier the truth about Bangalore, warts and all, rather than the state-sanctioned version of India’s saintly morality that Halwai worries the Chinese premier would otherwise be force fed. However, this rationale feels at best forced as the letter takes a book-length detour so that Halwai might tell his own life story. Often, the epistolary form of the tell-all account seems less a matter of narrative necessity than a way to snappily address sideline quips directly to someone (“But pay attention, Mr. Premier!”; “I confess, Mr. Premier: I am not an original thinker—but I am an original listener.”; “Is there a ‘Chinese’ liquor, Mr. Premier? I’d love to take a sip.”)

Despite these literary stumbles, Mr. Adiga’s caustic wit and scathing commentary on the sort of morality that wins in modern India reveals the burning hypocrisies, inequities and antediluvian social skeleton that riddle the world’s largest democracy. These hard truths form part of the foundation for India’s recent economic success, and pose some of its largest challenges for sustaining itself in the future.

Mr. Frumin is a free-lance journalist based in New Delhi.