Play mistry for me

Family Matters, by Rohinton Mistry. New York: Knopf. 448 pages. $26.

Family Matters sounds less like a name for a novel than for a whole tradition in fiction, extending from Jane Austen's Bennetts to Trollope's Pallisers and, now, to Rohinton Mistry's Chenoys. But for several generations the Family Matters novel has largely been shunted aside by the twentieth-century triumph of a rival fictional school whose slogan is Stream of Consciousness and which has produced Woolf, Joyce, and Proust. The first sort of novel is concrete, social, and builds character from the outside in; the second, seemingly more modern sort moves from the inside out.

Reading Mistry, however, helps us realize that the shift from realist to modernist fiction in English has as much to do with social change as with progress in technique. Bath and Barchester were minutely hierarchical, densely grained, self-- contained worlds, where the position of each character on the grids of birth and wealth could be, and had to be, exactly charted. In the West in the twentieth century, such distinctions became at once less dear and less important, and the drama of social elevation or decline less gripping. For Lydia Bennett to run off with her officer lover meant total disgrace, ostracism, and disinheritance; for a young woman in contemporary London or New York, it's a learning experience. Character can be explored from within because it is no longer so rigorously imposed from without.

The excitement of Rohinton Mistry's new novel-his third, following A Fine Balance, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize-is that it discovers, in our own day, a place where the traditional novel is once again possible. That the place is Bombay, one of the many cities long plundered to equip Barchester's clergy with their fat incomes, adds a deep irony to Family Matters; but Mistry is a good enough writer to acknowledge this irony without making it his subject. Indeed, a running theme of the book is the way its central plot-the story of two connected families, the Vakeels and the Chenoys, and their travails with love and money-is nearly overwhelmed by the political and historical world that surrounds it. Austen said that her novels were carved from a few inches of ivory, but Mistry's ivory is set atop several feet of splintery wood and spiked steel. Yet he does not allow this to make the drama of personal life seem irrelevant, a bourgeois luxury. In this, he shows himself to be a profoundly humane and, in the classic sense, liberal writer: one who acknowledges that the core of human life is in the everyday, immediate, and personal.

The drama of Family Matters takes place over several months in the mid-'90s, as the family of the aged Nariman Vakeel tries to cope with his drastic decline into Parkinson's disease. As the story opens, he is living in a roomy apartment with his stepchildren, the timorous Jal and the cold, grievance-hoarding Coomy; his truly beloved daughter, Roxana, lives with her husband, Yezad, and her two children in a tiny flat. It is a declaration of war when Coomy, stuffed with old resentments and disgusted by her father's stinks and effluvia, carts him over to Roxana's for three weeks of recuperation.

In doing so, Coomy marks herself out as the egoist, the miser, the emotional cripple, whom Dickens in particular taught readers to see as the archetypal novelistic villain. Other peripheral characters are also Dickensian in their flatness and comic repetitiveness: above all, the handyman Edul Munshi, a fine creation, whose enthusiasm for DIY as an ideology is matched by his total incompetence at every project he undertakes.

Such characters do not really change, and so they cannot be at the center of the novel. The soul at stake in Family Matters is that of Yezad Chenoy, husband of Roxana and manager of the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium. His fate will be determined by two linked challenges: how to find the money to care for "the chief," installed on his settee and filling his apartment with foul odors; and how to resist the resentment, personal and political, this new responsibility kindles in him. This kind of reflective, bourgeois character is the classic protagonist for the novel, replacing the heroes and gods of ancient epics, and Roxana makes this literary genealogy explicit:

So in the morning he was ready again, armed with optimism. She watched him return to the fray, knowing how it would end in the evening, and knowing that he knew it too, and yet he persevered. Then she felt her husband was as brave and strong as any Rustam or Sohrab, her hero, whose mundane exploits deserved to be recorded in his very own Shah-Nama ....

The Shah-Nama is an epic Persian poem, and it is the appropriate reference, since the Vakeel-Chenoy clan are all Parsis-that is, Indians of Persian descent who practice the pre-Islamic religion of Zoroastrianism. The demands of that faith, and its iron prohibition against intermarriage, are central to the novel. But Yezad's challenge is actually more difficult than a heroic quest, since it has no goal or conclusion: It is a matter of maintaining one's faith and decency day after day.

That struggle is particularly hard in contemporary Bombay, Mistry shows us, because of the abominable state-half ridiculous, half terrifying-of Indian politics. Petty corruption and graft are everywhere-one character suggests that the Indian national emblem should be a suitcase stuffed with cash-and the rising political force is the Hindu nationalist BJP, associated with the thugs of Shiv Sena, an organization Mistry portrays as only slightly better than the Nazi Brownshirts. Yezad has it bad on both fronts. As a non-Hindu, he is a potential target for extortion and violence; as a model-minority Parsi, he holds himself to high standards of honesty and accomplishment. Thus he cannot bring himself even to play the lottery without guilt, much less smile at clients who ask for kickbacks or at his boss's under-the-table cash transactions.

Exactly how this fraught situation develops is the substance of the novel, and Mistry's deft plotting shouldn't be revealed in advance. Suffice it to say that the book is finally a comedy, or at least a comedy with a tragicomic epilogue; by the end, Roxana can say that "when she looked back over all the events that had led them to this evening, it was almost proof of divine power in the universe...." From the novelist's point of view, of course, there is no divine power at work, only the intertwined powers of the city, the family, and the soul, which together spin out each individual's fate. By giving each of these three elements its due but reserving his final interest for the soul, Mistry incarnates much of what is best and most neglected in traditional English fiction.

[Sidebar]

Austen said that her novels were carved from a few inches of ivory, but Mistry's ivory is set atop several feet of splintery wood and spiked steel. Yet he does not make the drama of personal life seem irrelevant.

[Author Affiliation]

Adam Kirsch's first book of poems, The Thousand Wells, has just been published by Ivan R. Dee.