Summary
Eleven stories, 197 pages, and almost as many kinds of American. Mukherjee had written until then about Indians abroad; here the narrators include an Iraqi Jewish middleman by way of Flushing, Queens, whose journey through Central America gives the collection its title, a Vietnam veteran coming home to a Florida he no longer recognizes, an Italian American woman in the suburbs, a Trinidadian mother's helper, an Atlanta investment banker and the aristocratic Filipina who is remaking her life alongside him. Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times called them all exiles, expatriates, wanderers, marked by rootlessness and dislocation, and that is the collection's shape: a country changing hands, seen from every side of the transaction.
The story most often taught is the last, The Management of Grief. Shaila Bhave's husband and two sons are among the Toronto Indians killed when a bomb brings down an airliner off the coast of Ireland. The community fills her house; a Canadian social worker, Judith Templeton, enlists Shaila, who seems calm, to help her reach the other bereaved; Shaila flies to Ireland to identify the bodies and cannot, travels on to India, and hears her husband tell her to finish alone what they started together. Back in Toronto she sits with Judith in the home of an elderly couple who will not sign the forms that would admit their sons are dead, and walks out on the job. The story ends with a vision of her family in a winter park telling her to go, be brave, and with Shaila walking on. The story Jasmine grew into Mukherjee's 1989 novel of that name; Orbiting, A Wife's Story and the title story are the most anthologized.
The range is the point and also the risk. Publishers Weekly found the ambition sometimes undercut the authenticity and immediacy, and judged the stories told by Indian women the strongest, while praising a keen eye for telling and sensuous detail and prose that surprises with trenchant wit. Best for readers who want the immigrant story told as comedy, thriller and elegy by turns.
Historical Context & Significance
The Middleman and Other Stories won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for 1988, presented in early 1989, over Don DeLillo's Libra, Pete Dexter's Paris Trout, J. F. Powers's Wheat That Springeth Green and Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From. Dexter's novel had won the National Book Award that autumn and Carver's went on to be a Pulitzer finalist. Grove Press published it in 1988, and the Times Book Review named it a notable book of the year.
Mukherjee was born in Calcutta in 1940, took an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963, married the writer Clark Blaise, and spent more than a decade in Canada, teaching at McGill in Montreal and then living in Toronto, before the couple returned to the United States. She became an American citizen in 1988, the year the book appeared, and said in 1989 that she considered herself an American writer and not an Indian expatriate writer. The Management of Grief came out of The Sorrow and the Terror (1987), her nonfiction book with Blaise on the bombing of Air India Flight 182. She taught at Berkeley and died in 2017, aged 76. Grove reissued the collection in 2020.
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