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The Middleman and Other Stories

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Bharati Mukherjee's work illuminates a new world of people in migration that has transformed the meaning of "America." Now in a Grove paperback edition, The Middleman and Other Stories is a dazzling display of the vision of this important modern writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into the center of a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, yet glowing with the energy and exuberance of a society remaking itself.

197 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

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About the author

Bharati Mukherjee

48 books222 followers
Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian-born award winning American writer who explored the internal culture clashes of her immigrant characters in the award-winning collection The Middleman and Other Stories and in novels like Jasmine and Desirable Daughters.

Ms. Mukherjee, a native of Calcutta, attended schools in England, Switzerland and India, earned advanced degrees in creative writing in the United States and lived for more than a decade in Canada, affording her a wealth of experience in the modern realities of multiculturalism.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and a master’s degree from the University of Baroda, in Gujarat, in 1961. After sending six handwritten stories to the University of Iowa, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she studied with Philip Roth and Vance Bourjaily in her first year. She earned an M.F.A. in 1963 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1969 at Iowa.

After years of short-term academic appointments, Ms. Mukherjee was hired in 1989 to teach postcolonial and world literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bharati Mukherjee died on Saturday, January 28, 2017 in Manhattan. She was 76.

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5 stars
109 (17%)
4 stars
244 (38%)
3 stars
214 (33%)
2 stars
48 (7%)
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21 (3%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews
1,831 reviews102 followers
February 3, 2021
This is a powerful collection of short stories about people caught between cultures. These stories explore the ways cultural displacement impact intimate relationships.
Profile Image for Alison.
Author 3 books37 followers
July 23, 2015
Mukherjee isn't one of those self-congratulatory assholes who thinks she's bucking political correctness (whatever the fuck that means) by hating on Indians (and everybody else), but a real thinker who wants immigrant, encounter, and postcolonial lit to exist beyond the binaries of white/nonwhite, good/evil, and, especially, nice/not-nice. Her characters are NOT NICE. For any writer to do that, with immigrant characters or not, while still keeping alive some sense of human dignity and struggle and sadness, is a powerful thing. How many books can you think of with really unlikeable characters whom you have to sympathize with, without the intervention of a totally good, uncomplicated savior character to show them the light, or a dead baby or run-in with the KKK to make them pitiable? Not many (I'm thinking, Lolita? I was going to say, The Sea, The Sea, but it's got one of those mitigating elements going on). I think that it's a model many readers are uncomfortable with, despite all our self-help hooha about accepting people as they are. Which may also be why so many other readers (including myself) were most moved by the story "The Management of Grief": it moved us not only because it was good, but also because it didn't challenge us to think morally.

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.

Profile Image for Will.
280 reviews79 followers
August 28, 2018
A good example of boilerplate MFA writing. Starts in medias res, continues in the first person with a mix of fragments, rhetorical questions, blunt descriptors ("the fat man"), voice-driven small talk, and supposedly telling but rather trivial details ("Charity bought a used blue Datsun ('Nissan,' Phil insists)"). The characters are mostly unlikeable, and for all the fuss about how "brave" writers must be to use that perspective, the Unlikeable Character has probably been the most typical character type in the short story for the last several decades.
Profile Image for Moses Kilolo.
Author 5 books103 followers
August 19, 2013
Something about this book isn't quite clicking with me. Maybe the premise, not that I don't enjoy stories about the immigrant experience, but this book at this time just isn't working for me.

I know I never abandon books. If I do I delete them from my lists and try not to think of them. But for this one, I feel I should just go back to it some other time. Maybe then I will be able to see what I can't see now.

The first few stories I read didn't quite stand out except for A Wife's Story which I find both deep and quietly truthful of a woman receiving a husband she has lived away from.

But the writing contains some pretty nice passages, quotes if you like:

They work hard, eat cheap, live ten to a room, stash their savings under futons in Queens, and before you know it they own half of Hoboken. You say, where's the sweet gullibility that made this nation great?

So I walk away from it with guilt. Maybe it will be assuaged later, when I can read and feel the stories resonate.

Damn, I need to get out of my world for a while, see what other worlds look like. I'm not talking about Mars. Just outside of my country. Whose borders I've never crossed. Is that how you find yourself able to identify with Bharati Mukherjee's characters' experiences? I doubt. But then, some other time.
Profile Image for Thing Two.
986 reviews49 followers
November 5, 2014
This collection, from the mid-80s pulls together a dozen stories of people in the middle. All are caught in some type of struggle -- from a grieving widow struggling to move on to a man being sucked into a drug deal -- the voices vary, but the stories are well done.
Profile Image for Vaishali.
1,121 reviews297 followers
April 12, 2014
Fantastic story-telling about complex, believable people. Guaranteed: you've run into each of her protagonists and other characters.
Profile Image for Old Man JP.
1,183 reviews59 followers
February 17, 2022
A collection of short stories featuring immigrants, mostly Indian but not all, to America who have their own personal issues. For the most part they're not the most likeable people you would want to meet. The best story is about an Iraqi Jew who ends up going to El Salvador where he has a one night affair with a woman who murders her husband and then runs off with a revolutionary leaving the Iraqi Jew in the jungle. Another story, that was fairly good, was about an Indian woman who meets a very arrogant man on line but doesn't hear from him again and so she later meets a man with no arms with whom she starts a relationship. She then gets a call from the arrogant man. He smugly dismisses what she says and laughingly tells her that she will come to him, and so she does, leaving the armless man, thinking it won't be the end of his world. The stories were, for the most part, mostly unpleasant and a little disturbing. This was a National Book Critics Circle Award winner but not something I enjoyed reading.
Profile Image for Natalee.
257 reviews5 followers
January 25, 2019
DNF.

I found almost every character insufferable. And don’t get me wrong, insufferable characters can be great characters. But these were irredeemably insufferable characters, and often it felt like Mukherjee wasn’t even critiquing their horrible qualities. Ex. a lot of the male characters were low key (or sometimes high key) misogynistic, and nothing was said for or against it; they just were (and that in itself can be a valuable thing to write about, but I just don’t think Mukherjee pulled it off).

That being said, “Fathering” was a 5/5 story from this collection. Definitely give that one a read. Its emotions are deliciously complex and entangled.
Profile Image for Vampire Who Baked.
152 reviews100 followers
October 14, 2022
the OG bengali/south asian diaspora writer, like jhumpa lahiri, except more electric but with less poise. at her best when she writes from a familiar POV (extended south asian ethnicity, immigrant/in exile in the US, female), falters slightly with unfamiliar perspectives with imagined histories and sensibilities. characters are sometimes too wild to have much depth, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Profile Image for Fred Daly.
729 reviews7 followers
April 20, 2019
Mukherjee's world is a brutal place, so few of these stories would be appropriate for my students. I like the way she immerses you in a situation and makes you figure out what's going on. "Jasmine" is a particular favorite of mine.
932 reviews18 followers
August 28, 2024
“The Management of Grief” is the best story in the collection, and it’s a stunner…most of the others were just okay. Mukherjee captures the feelings of displacement and inbetweenness in the immigrant experience in its many varieties…but without a whole lot of nuance or subtlety.
Profile Image for inoirita .
139 reviews49 followers
June 30, 2022
An author I’ll forever be indebted to my English degree for introducing me to is Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian American-Canadian writer and a professor in the Department of English, University of California. Born in British Calcutta and an alumnus of University of Calcutta, she went on to write several works of fiction and non-fiction and co-authored ‘Days and Nights in Calcutta’ with her husband, Clark Blaise which was published in 1977.

The collection of eleven short stories in ‘The Middleman and Other Stories’ published in 1988 won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year. In these works, a definitive picture of the modern prose emphasizes on cultural incertitude, intimate relationships and the dilemmas of the modern Indian woman in the western society. Most of the stories are an output of the disillusionment faced by people who find themselves surrounded with customs and standards they find uncomfortable to fit into. The Iraqi middleman, the assassin in Miami or the young girl called Jasmine are all creations of the sense of not belonging that Mukherjee has tried to communicate through her fiction. She herself found her life taking her from one place to another since she was a child and it is a possibility that the first generation immigrant experiences in her works are indeed very personal. Most of the short fictions in this collection are a reflection of Mukherjee considering herself as an American writer and not an Indian expatriate, as they end with coming to terms with the substantial cultural transposition.
Profile Image for Ryan.
1,105 reviews
October 21, 2012
After reading The Middleman and Other Stories twice, I have decided that I wouldn't want to be a character in a Bharati Mukherjee story.

Alfie, an Iraqi Jew who ends up in El Salvador by way of Queens, lusts after Maria in the title story. Maria was once with President Gutierrez but is now married to a wealthy rancher and businessman. Her current sexual allegiances lie with a revolutionary. Will Al get the girl?

Well, Al gets the girl, for one night. Then he watches as she murders her husband and runs off with the revolutionary. Al is left in the jungle, surrounded by dead bodies. Fortunately, Al is not distraught. He wonders how he will sell the information to Gutierrez.

It's difficult to find innocents in this exploration of immigration, which I found refreshing. Immigration is often treated as an identity crisis or as a maker/ taker relationship. While these themes are present in The Middleman and Other Stories, I was pleased to notice that Mukherjee had found more than two angles from which to approach her subject. At other times, she starts along familiar paths and ends up in bizarre destinations.

If there is a pattern here it might be this: when these characters try to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, they usually end up using those straps to choke the life out of their problems.

Sometimes, those problems are other people. In "Loose Ends," Jeb the Vietnam veteran works as a hitman for a Latino crime lord. In the war, he was told to be a locust, always consuming. However, murder for hire has allowed Jeb to overcome neither his impotence nor his insolvency. Instead, he finds a sense of resolution when he murders a girl in her parents' motel.

Mukherjee's strength as a short fiction writer is her ability to turn a story on its head in just a few sentences. She is not a beautiful stylist and few would call her a kind author to her characters, but she does write excellent short stories.
Profile Image for Sofie .
13 reviews1 follower
February 2, 2011
A lot of these stories are really interesting from the perspective of post-colonial studies. As an immigrant myself I found it really interesting to see how Mukherjee explored the different aspects of that experience, and with a sense of humor too. I particularly recommend 'Orbiting'.
363 reviews5 followers
January 28, 2015
A jarring and beautifully poignant collection of short stories about immigrants, their tragedies and triumphs in leaving and arriving, The Middleman present a touching variety of voices and perspectives.
Profile Image for Jeff Hobbs.
1,051 reviews31 followers
Want to read
December 21, 2023
Read so far:

*The middleman--
A wife's story--2
Loose ends--
*Orbiting--
Fighting for the rebound--
The tenant--2
Fathering--
Jasmine--
*Danny's girls--
Buried lives--
*The management of grief--
***
*Angela
*Saints
The lady from Lucknow--2
173 reviews
January 22, 2016
Bhurati writes with such richness. Her characters are all deeply flawed and or troubled. She is skilled. She is outlandish in her imagination. I love her complexity in describing life.
Profile Image for Steve Chisnell.
497 reviews7 followers
April 26, 2023
There are moments and tales of real poignancy in this collection of culturally intersectional desperations. Mukherjee stretches his experience to reach into scenarios across the planet, across politics and economic status, across legal borders--in the end, a reader cannot hope to guess what unspoken chapter of emigration and collision will be exposed next. For all of this, there are few works like it.

At the same time, we cannot guess the outcomes to such moments of abrupt circumstance. One of his off-stage characters describes the world as one of fractals, and this is as good a description of the narrative closures as we are likely to receive. Do not expect, then, that morally focused characters will find justice, that mistakes will be forgiven, even that a journey will find its end. Mukherjee's resolutions are often far more subtle, either open-staging a place for new tragedy or turning unexpectedly into a brief peaceful rest. As life offers no promises, nor do these stories.

While raw in this way (some of the characters and settings are affrontive and unsettling), unless readers allow the tales to dictate their own rules, most of these stories may feel unsatisfying. The connections and resolutions they offer are in micro-moments, in an emotive response, in a step inward to something new. This is, perhaps, as it should be. My own expectations for story are grounded in a Western patriarchal progression of narrative: no wonder, then, that I shift uneasily at times as I encounter her brutal and broken male perspectives, her "casting back" at my idealistic naivete for the fairy tale.
Profile Image for Penn Hackney.
186 reviews26 followers
February 23, 2022
New Yorker worthy, but that’s not great praise.

Very clever, funny, sharply observant, easy to read. Built for the New Yorker: glib, in medias res camera shots that don’t go anywhere but told with impeccable prose. The last one, The Management of Grief, was well crafted and moving with a plethora of likable and recognizable characters, and great emotional depth and verisimilitude, but the ending was meaningless and a complete deflation. Close to the end of it I had come, as privileged white male (as she is a privileged Hindu woman) who has suffered a half dozen unfair and prolonged or unexpected familial losses, to find she was a self-absorbed, emotionally lazy, coward. I have to think the author was lazy, too, without the energy or imagination to suggest anything at all, which leaves the reader either unsatisfied (me) or having to make up one's own ending out of nothing.

One cannot achieve acceptance and serenity after unimaginable tragedy unless one is helping others in some way, and the protagonoist deliberately turned her back on opportunities to be of use. Most if the stories were similarly, if not so dramatically, unsatisfying.

Stories I liked were Orbiting and Fighting for the Rebound.
Profile Image for Rebecca.
959 reviews
January 1, 2021
This was a tough read for me. These short stories are bleak, presenting situations that are hard to face, and I can't argue that they are false.

Interesting that this book published in 1988 provides such insight into the experiences of immigrants to the US and the people who were here before them - how it feels to be them. Depictions of gaming the system, creating a system, bucking a system that is unfair, succumbing to the system.

Compare The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami, and the view it gives us of the immigrant experience.

Compare Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, especially this passage from "The Tenant," in which the central character reflects on the news that her host's nephew is in love with a student from Ghana - "Dr. Chatterji's horror is real. A good Brahmin boy in Iowa is in love with an African Muslim. It shouldn't be a big deal. But the more she watches the physicist, the more she realizes that "Brahmin" isn't a caste; it's a metaphor. You break one small rule, and the constellation collapses." (page 106).
Profile Image for George.
2,837 reviews
February 7, 2021
3.5 stars. An interesting, thought provoking collection of eleven short stories mainly about or related to immigrant experiences to and in the USA. The migrants are from Afghanistan, Asia and Latin America. The author describes a number of varied events including people smuggling, illegal entry, and assimilation.

My favourite stories are ‘A Wife’s Story’, ‘Orbiting’ and ‘The Tenant’. In ‘Orbiting’ a daughter brings her Afghanistan boyfriend to meet her parents. When she introduces her boyfriend she states “He was born in Afghanistan,” I explain. But dad gets continents wrong. He says, “We saw your famine camps on T.V. Well, you won’t starve this afternoon.”

There are some unpleasant stories in this collection including the experiences of a drug dealer, the mindset of murderer and rapist, and a mother’s grief after she learns her sons died in a plane crash. They were on their way to begin a new life in the USA.
Profile Image for Kate.
331 reviews1 follower
July 17, 2024
Wow. Every time I read another off my silly listicle it’s another book I’ve never heard of that just blows my mind. This was astonishing. It was gritty, even grimy at times. Mukherjee isn’t a very flowery writer- her prose is sparse but so precise and really, really evocative. I was continually impressed at how quickly I felt dropped into each story’s setting and subsumed into the character’s psyche. I didn’t necessarily enjoy each story but I enjoyed how well all of them were written and how successfully ambivalent this collection is. There isn’t always closure or satisfaction but in a very human way.
Profile Image for David Chambers.
15 reviews
April 23, 2020
I really enjoyed Mukherjee's voice in this collection of short stories.

The great majority of these stories talk about the immigrant experience in the Americas. In a time when we've heard from a variety of directions about either the plight of or the dread of immigration, it's nice to just read about the day to day life. Oh wait, all people are like me- they think, they feel, they love, they read.

I think because we've been forced to either be impassioned for or against- we forget that the "cause" we're rallying around are really just folks trying to figure this whole thing out.

Profile Image for Edward .
53 reviews7 followers
December 7, 2020
An unusual and unkind world setting.

Stories of cultural clash among characters as they are far from their homes and on the new world. Some a boring, some are dark, some are disturbingly odd. Stories do contain emphasis on their characters' personal struggle, whether romantic; sexual; emotional; financial; or moral.

Picked this book out of a whim. The first few stories didn't sink to me immediately., but the latter paved way. It's a good quick read and style study. Not much care on the narrative as the stories aren't much unique in today's standards, the way I see it.
Profile Image for Alan Morgan.
22 reviews
November 13, 2023
There's some strong moments in here. The prose is short and snappy, simple and straightforward without neglecting tone or imagery. I like a couple of these stories for sure, especially the first few.

That said, the stories all have so many characters that it just gets distracting to try and keep track of them all. For instance, Orbiting introduces 4 characters on the first page alone--that's too many to remember from one single page. After that story had no payoff, I didn't finish the ones that had more than five named characters.
Profile Image for Charles Albert.
Author 22 books5 followers
May 13, 2021
These stories are very much a product of their time and place. Which is, of course, exactly what MFA teachers around the globe tell us all we have to focus on. "Make it real," they say. "Show, don't tell." Well, here we have a collection of stories in and around New York, all from a variety of narrators from young Indian immigrant women to old redneck men. And they all feel very 1980s and irrelevant, somehow.
Profile Image for Courtney Ferriter.
569 reviews33 followers
November 26, 2022
** 3 stars **

Most of the stories in this collection were just okay for me, but the final story, "The Management of Grief," which is about the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985 (the deadliest act of aviation terrorism prior to 9/11/2001) that killed all 329 people on board and the aftermath of this tragedy for their relatives, was really excellent, and I highly recommend it. You can find a PDF version of just this story online using Google.
193 reviews
July 5, 2023
beautiful, difficult stories

The author is a master with creating images, scenes, and situations, all with a sure grasp of the dilemmas faced by her characters. Although a couple of the stories were less strong, the best of them leave indelible impressions. A difficult pleasure.
84 reviews1 follower
July 27, 2023
wow. i don’t know what i was expecting but it wasn’t the emotional rollercoaster that i experienced. Mukherjee’s writing is definitely something. She is lyrical and truthful in all the best ways, this book was a cultivation of all her best skills, I’m happy to have read it.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews

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