Where's the Love?

So I'm just about finished with this Suitable Boy tome, with about 150 pages left. (Do not anyone tell me any ending secrets or I will personally see that those blabbers receive as much Evil Eye as is humanly possible.) Grammatically dubious parenthetical thoughts aside, I've been fishing around for another novel-type-thing to take its place when I've done with it. I usually have about five or six different books going at any given time, only one of which specifically falls into the comparatively "light" category of novel.
And so it was that I turned to Arundhati Roy's "the God of Small Things." I thought it sounded interesting, despite some dire warnings of hugely depressing subject matter from other parties. So while I was locked out of my house yesterday afternoon as a result of my own stupidity I sat down to read my borrowed copy, rather fittingly, in the rain.
Very little apart from Lemony Snicket could have prepared my for the startling morbidity of this text. Every character is either dead, a murderer/manslaughterer, a rapist, an abusive husband, a wretched "man-less woman," or some variation on this general theme. The only characters, in fact, who seem to have any love for each other are the miserable dizygotic twins, Rahel and Esthappen. They, needless to say, are the continual victims, thus far, of brutal neglect and a horrendous destruction of innocence.
Why must a novel contain such lurid, over-drawn melancholy? This is merely my first impression as I haven't finished the book, but, simply put, प्यार कहॉ है?
I will grant that the whole thing is written in an intriguingstyle with lots of linguistic liberties given and taken, as well as a capitalization Free For All, and I admire these things. But I contrast Roy's approach to subject matter with that of Vikramji, who imbues his novel with plenty of sadness, but everything else as well! and frankly, I find the latter more aesthetically satisfying...