What do you think?
Rate this book
197 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
So I like and admire the challenge. But, Mukherjee can also be irritatingly sloppy. Small examples: for her to write, "Mr. Venkatesan was beginning to feel like a character in Anne Frank's diary," is bizarre in so many ways. It's "Upper Mountain Avenue" in Montclair, not "Upper Mountainside Road," though she was right that you can't buy the ticket onboard the NJ-bound Decamp bus--that snippet delighted me. And 1988 was too late for her to be using "Orientals" to describe East Asians, besides which, I hate to have to say this, but as a so-called Oriental herself she should have known better. And, far too many of the stories had female Asian characters whose primary motivation was that they wanted to have depressing sex with the wrong guys. It's all too common, but a writer who can invent an Iraqi Jew who unwittingly aids a Central American revolution should have tried a little harder.