Shrewdly, Siddhartha Deb’s “The Beautiful and the Damned” avoids reaching for this category altogether and is very much the finer book for it. Deb, the author of two novels and an associate professor at the New School, borrows his title from F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his mission is similar to Fitzgerald’s: to ponder, at intimate range, lives within a society in great ferment. “A country that has seen a sudden infusion of wealth and a rapid disengagement with its past tends to throw up people who are traveling very quickly and seem to have no clear antecedents,” Deb writes in the book’s first chapter, almost by way of laying out his thesis. This describes the Roaring Twenties as well as it describes India in the 21st century.

That splendid first chapter, titled “The Great Gatsby,” profiles the most Fitzgeraldian of Deb’s figures. Arindam Chaudhuri is hard to miss in India: He appears, in regrettable suits and a glossy ponytail, in large newspaper advertisements nearly every day, hawking the top-notch M.B.A. degrees his management institutes claim to dispense. Chaudhuri’s advertisements suggest snake-oil patter, so Deb patiently seeks to reveal the man within the salesman. Chaudhuri is, we find, startlingly insecure, so unsure of his place in modern India that he trusts no one and is driven by “this Manichaean idea of people divided into the loyal and the disloyal, of Arindam at odds with the rest of the world.”

In a neat inversion, Chaudhuri makes his living off identical insecurities in his students — students who can scrape together his tuition, but whose English may not be quite be as good as their Hindi or who think they lack the sophistication required in India’s corporations. Many of Chaudhuri’s graduates can find employment only in his own enterprises, their salaries paid, in a sense, by their successors, the education-starved young men and women thronging the institute. The scheme in its entirety, Deb realizes, carries the sour whiff of Ponzi. (When this chapter was excerpted in the Indian magazine Caravan, Deb and the magazine were promptly sued by Chaudhuri; thanks to an injunction, the Indian edition of the book has been robbed of its first ­essay.)

Life in today’s India is said to be about new confidence and prosperity, but Deb suggests that the country’s heartbeat races from anxiety as well as excitement. Part of this anxiety is linked to physical dislocation, as with the itinerant steelworkers Deb visits — laborers who, in the quest for employment, have had to wrench themselves repeatedly from their homes in rural India. But the anxiety is also less immediate; people betray a distinct unease about the rapidity of change, or a fear of being excluded from the wealth and prospects erupting around them. Even Deb succumbs, at one point, to this gnawing anomie. “I wondered why I didn’t have a suit, designer sunglasses and car keys,” he writes, after meeting one among the more polished of Chaudhuri’s graduates. “I wondered why I wasn’t making money at this time in India when moneymaking opportunities seemed to be everywhere for the asking.”

Deb works largely within the format of the profile, which allows him to closely inspect the dents made by modern India in his characters’ lives. None of his subsequent four essays can quite match his chapter on Chaudhuri, either for drama or for acuteness of insight, but they are all patiently observed and thoughtfully composed. Deb talks to cigar salesmen, microchip designers, arms dealers and software engineers; he sifts through the politics of sorghum farmers in Andhra Pradesh, and he charts the Brownian motions of his wandering steelworkers. “The men . . . were infernal creatures, rags wrapped around their faces to protect themselves from the heat, inevitably dwarfed by the extremity of the place, with everything so large, so fast and so hot,” Deb writes of the laborers’ temporary home. Even their limbo is hell.