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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Whereas Salman Rushdie's celebrated "Midnight's Children" gave us Bombay with a headlong, fantastic, word-twirling magic realism, Rohinton Mistry, a Bombay-born Canadian, presents the same diverse, congested metropolis with a realism that, if too wry to be called sober, might be termed Tolstoyan. In a polished but economical and unobtrusive prose, he writes of household dramas, of plausibly confined, earthbound lives seeking to generate on their own a spark of relieving magic. Mistry harks back to the nineteenth-century novelists, for whom every detail, every urban alley, every character however lowly added a vital piece to the full social picture, and for whom every incident illustrated the eventually crushing weight of the world. Liveliness, precision, weight: these old-fashioned mimetic virtues, and the broad sympathy that calls them into being, cannot be taken for granted during a time when the producers and consumers alike of fiction have had their sensibilities early deadened by an incessant barrage of visual entertainment as insubstantial as it is eye-catching. In a world of hurry and quick artistic killing, Mistry has kept the patience to tease narrative and moral interest out of domestic life, in a subcontinent of more than a billion striving, often desperate souls. His new novel, "Family Matters" (Knopf; $26), announces its territory in the title; its plot concerns the disruptions and changes in an extended family when its patriarch, the retired professor Nariman Vakeel, at the age of seventy-nine breaks his ankle and requires nursing care.
He has been living with his unmarried middle-aged stepchildren, Jal (male) and Coomy (female) Contractor, in a spacious apartment in a building grandly called Chateau Felicity. Unable to cope with the hygienic needs of Nariman's...
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