Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories Winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, Bharati Mukherjee's 1988 short story collection The Middleman and Other Stories offers an exuberant (if sometimes violent) look at the contemporary American immigrant experience.  One of the stories from this collection became the basis for Mukherjee's follow-up novel, Jasmine (1989).  Mukherjee's other works of fiction include:  • The Tiger's Daughter (1971)  • Wife (1975)  • Darkness (1985)  • The Holder of the World (1993)  • Leave it to Me (1997)

Pre-reading questions:

• A pre-reading recommendation: Before you start reading, write down the title of each story in the collection on a separate piece of paper.  As you read, in addition to marking up your book (striking metaphors, key moments, surprising developments, great sentences), jot down a few notes on your piece of paper to help you remember which characters and story lines appear in which tales.  This will help you in class discussion as well as on the final exam.  It will also help you formulate your ideas about the ways in which the different stories might connect to each other (see below).  And it may also help you answer this question: do the titles of the stories themselves give any particular "spin" to the book?  Do they help communicate its predominant themes or issues?  How?
• William Faulkner on the short story: "In a short story ... almost every word has got to be almost exactly right.  In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't....  [I]t demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash."  Do Mukherjee's stories stand up to Faulkner's requirements?  In what ways?
• Many of these stories were originally published in separate magazines, then collected together for this book.  Is there any apparent order or guiding principle to the selection here?  Some underlying pattern?  Why, for example, begin this book with the story, "The Middleman"?
• Nearly every story presents a different voice, if not a different ethnicity.  What is the effect, as you read, of all these different voices?  Is it disorienting?  Envigorating?  Something else?
• Which other works in this course do these stories recall, either in terms of their style or their thematic concerns?  How?  One obvious link might be to Typical American or My Antonia -- the two texts most explicitly concerned with "immigrant's" tales.  Are Mukherjee's stories of a piece with Jen's and Cather's books?  Or can fruitful comparisons be made with other texts in the course?  If so, which ones, and why?
• What do Mukherjee's immigrants want from America?  What do her American characters want from her immigrants?
• Take a moment to look at the design of the cover of your edition. What sense of the book does this cover (especially the photograph) convey?  A very recent edition features a very different cover (see below).  Is that a better 'preview' of the book that follows?  Which cover seems more appropriately evocative?
• Why end this book with "The Management of Grief"?  Another way to ask this: what kind of ending does "The Management of Grief" give to the book?
• This book was originally published by a different press and with a different cover (see below).  How do the covers differ?  Does the new cover give a reader different expectations for what one might find in the volume than the old?  If so, how?  Which cover do you think is a more appropriate one for the volume?  Why?

Our cover (Grove Press, 1999)	The original cover (Fawcett, 1988)
click image for larger view	click image for larger view

Web links:

• Bharati Mukherjee (Contemporary Authors)
• Bharati Mukherjee (South Asian Women's NETwork)
• Bharati Mukherjee (Emory Univ.)
• Bharati Mukherjee (Voices From the Gaps)
• "American Dreamer" (Mukherjee on the meaning of being American)
• "Two Ways to Belong in America" (Mukherjee comparing her view of assimilation with her sister's)
• Span number 34-5: A Critique of Mukherjee's Neo-Nationalism (Anne Brewster)
• Interview with Mukherjee (George Jr.)
• Another interview with Mukherjee (Beatrice)
• Reading list from one of Mukherjee's own English courses
• South Asian Diaspora Literature -- a Bibliography

return to LIT 132 course syllabus