The Middleman And Other Stories (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
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.
America is a nation of immigrants. It's easy to forget that the immigrants of a century ago were just as marginalized and, by definition, foreign as the immigrants of today. These stories are primarily about Indians, Arabs, East Indians, and the Americans they relate to. This book gave me a real appreciation for the humanity of an educated man from Afghanistan trying to make it in New York, or an Indian family trying to run a motel in Florida. Bharati's language is beautiful and spare. Her scenarios are imaginative, mind opening, and often hard to take.
What do You think about The Middleman And Other Stories (1999)?
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.
—Moses Kilolo
