Something to be said for being reader-friendly!?

So I have been reading this book for a while, making time for it one or two days a week at a time, for an hour here and an hour there. It was gifted to me almost a year ago by my friend, and room-mate Richey, "The Point of Return" by Siddhartha Deb. I assume he picked it out because it was a book set in India, by an Indian author. I haven't investigated his reasons.

Anyway, it is a very interesting read, more so since I haven't read a book set in India, in such a long time. If I have one quibble with the book, it is that the author resorts to more than one word that you have to look up in a dictionary. Not to sound arrogant, but if I have to resort to looking words up, it makes you wonder what the author is trying to prove. In my humble opinion, if as an author you have to resort to the usage of obscure language to arguably enhance your novel, you're fighting a lost cause. Problem is most authors have a command and mastery of language and vocabulary that may be very natural to them, but often exceeds their audience for whom it may not be second or even third nature.

However, I also believe that you should not talk down to your readers or listeners. So how do you reconcile these two opposing points of view!? I don't claim to have all the answers. But as a writer myself, I do believe that one of your goals is not to drive your readers away, even if just for a second.

A sampler of said obscure words:
poseur
bier
hangdog
Friesian
simulacrum
elisions
solipsistically
innoxious
Bannerdown
reductive
prehensile

However, here's a couple of excerpts that I feel compelled to reproduce just because of how much they resonated with me.

"Perhaps this is the true return, the completion of a cycle set in motion long ago, and if it seems lonely, maybe it is because migration is a reductive evolutionary principle where the sprawling, oppressive family gives way to its streamlined nuclear descendant, to be replaced finally by the individual straining at the limits of memory."

"Put too much weight on any particular moment, force it into an epiphany, and experience cracks in half."

I haven't finished the book yet, hopefully should in a day or two, and then the verdict. I like it so far, just for the interesting window to the Indian North-East which is one of the few parts of India that I haven't seen yet. And with my renewed interest in traveling, that's something I hope to rectify at some point in the not-too-distant future.