Emigr?s Looking Homeward

...No wonder the stepchildren feel less than generous...

...His own father was one such victim of the Cultural Revolution, as was his mentor, Professor Yang, who spent years in disgrace and exile, relegated to backbreaking manual labor...

...Yang's drivel often sickened me, there was one virtue in it which I did like, namely that he spoke his mind now...

...A huge earring hung from his earlobe, casting on his throat an elongated shadow, which reminded me of a noose...

...Now, in Family Matters (Knopf, 448 pp., $26.00), Mistry seems to have tipped his well-known "fine balance" between celebration and despair of the human condition and taken a harsher view, particularly of the strictures of religion and traditional authority...

...Too much is spelled out, and too often, as if the author didn't trust his readers...

...Jal, who uses deafness to avoid strife, is weak-willed and passive, dominated by his sister...

...Kapur, but it is the extremists who commit the murder...

...When quixotic Mr...

...An epilogue set five years later portrays him as a thoroughgoing fanatic, oppressing his family with the rigid weight of orthodoxy...

...It is the forced wedding that took place 40 years ago, imposed by his ultra-orthodox parents...

...Jian's fellow students are the cautious children of the generation that was "re-educated" by being publicly humiliated and having their careers destroyed...

...It is 1989, the year of the notorious confrontation between the People's Liberation Army and student protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, and that incident will provide the dramatic finale to Ha Jin's shrewd, unpretentious story...

...The villagers' poverty and debasement shock him into giving up academia to seek an official position, where he might do some good for his countrymen...

...Nariman's son-in-law, Yezad, distraught by the hardships of caring for the dying man, sees his destiny transformed too...

...Was he feigning madness all along to escape an intolerable situation...

...Shades of King Lear as Nariman is well aware: "To so many classes I taught Lear, learning nothing myself...

...Think of the example they have set...

...How ironic, then, that in his confusion and grief, Yezad should return to the faith of his ancestors...

...In the end, wife and ex-lover, in melodramatic physical combat, fall off a rooftop to their death...

...I've been fooled by it all my life.'") and derides the academic life: '"Who is an intellectual in China...

...His rants reveal not only that he suspects his wife of a long-past adultery, but that he is being blackmailed by Secretary Peng because of his own current affair with a graduate student...

...If it were possible to read letters for all of humanity, compose an infinity of responses on their behalf, he would have a God'seye view of the world, and be able to understand it...

...Corruption breeds corruption is the unsubtle message...

...Originally Persian followers of the prophet Zarathustra, the Parsis take pride in their ancient religion with its elaborate rites, in being more Westernized than Hindus and Muslims, and in their devotion to education...

...Roxana is the good youngest child, almost as one-dimensional in her selflessness as Coomy in her pinched bitterness...

...Before long Yezad, the most rational of men, is following a neighbor's superstitious hunches for bets on the numbers game...

...He was in love with a Christian Goan woman, but his orthodox Parsi parents hounded him until he renounced her...

...He felt that chance events, random cruelty, unexplainable kindness, meaningless disaster, unexpected generosity could, together, form a design that was otherwise invisible...

...Meimei breaks up with him in disgust...

...Ha Jin's are spare, understated, disingenuous...

...Beyond that, their appeal is undeniably topical: They bring the essential news from afar with more pungency than any journalistic coverage possibly could...

...Now he lives in disharmony with his stepchildren, Jal and Coomy, both unmarried and in their late 40s...

...The ceiling Coomy destroyed collapses on her head, but the immediate cause is a comically inept neighbor who has undertaken to fix it and is crushed for his pains...

...nowadays we would say she stalked him, poisoning his family life for a decade...

...The novel's focus shifts midway from Nariman's decline to Yezad's transformation...

...Kapur, a colorful Dickensian figure, considers running for office to fight rampant civic corruption, Yezad is encouraging...

...Both are greatly gifted, appealing writers who have won prizes and enthusiastic praise...

...As a modem master of realism, Mistry is always worth reading, but Family Matters is less satisfying than Such a Long Journey and the magnificent A Fine Balance...

...local color replaces narrative impetus...

...In such a tangled web, the well-intentioned are impotent at best...

...But as Nariman's condition worsens and his needs take over the tiny space (Mistry, in true naturalist fashion, spares us no detail of the unreliable bodily functions of the terminally ill), the strain on the family grows palpable...

...Much of the ac tion takes place in the hospital room, with Jian puzzling over the patient's snatches of memory, song, poetry, and disjointed ravings...

...Mistry's novel is a wry tribute to Bombay's chaos and diversity, with its array of families crowded into two-room apartments, wealthy businessmen and professionals sporting imported designer clothes, schoolboys nurtured on British adventure stories, addicts of the numbers game, poor laborers still traumatized by the violence of the 1947 partition, and Shiv Sena thugs enforcing their brutish version of Hindu supremacy...

...What remains tantalizingly mysterious is the nature of Professor Yang's rants...

...The novel teems with details, always vivid but not always germane...

...the change would bring him a promotion and a raise...

...Was it overwork, professional rivalry, pressure to repay the university for his recent trip abroad, problems in his marriage...

...Not until he nears Tiananmen Square does he grasp that guns do not make fine discriminations of motive...

...The professor indulges in far-fetched riffs on Genesis, quotes from Dante mingled with lines from ancient Chinese poetry, and old patriotic songs and propaganda that he would surely scorn in his right mind-a potpourri of what literary theorists call "embedded text...

...Oppression takes a different form in Shanning, the university town where The Crazed is set...

...It is as if the author hopes to make tangible the vision of Vilas, an educated Hindu who writes letters for the illiterate...

...The job he had hoped for is closed to him because he is not a Party member...

...As in A Fine Balance, the narrative focuses on the minority Parsi community...

...Meanwhile, we follow the upheavals of Jian, a graduate student in literature, his fiancée Meimei, who is a medical student, her father, Professor Yang, and assorted members of Shanning's university staff and faculty, these last an unsavory pack of self-seeking conspirators...

...We're all dumb laborers kept by the state-a retrograde species.' " Listening, Jian grows increasingly uncertain about his own future...

...Or all of the above...

...As one character remarks, "In a culture where destiny is embraced as the paramount force, we are all puppets...

...The same corruption that pollutes this country is right here, in your own family, in Jal and Coomy's shameless trickery and betrayal," Yezad tells Roxana...

...To egg on Mr...

...The novel opens simply enough...

...No help is forthcoming from Jal and Coomy...

...Mistry's gifts are of the abundant, lavish variety...

...Yezad's story about Shiv Sena incites Mr...

...The central figure takes on symbolic force, becoming the emblem of an older generation, even of a heritage passed down but poorly tended...

...Not because of its pessimism, which is more than warranted, but because of its excesses and explicitness...

...Mistry was born in Bombay and migrated to Toronto in 1975...

...Kapur's death, Yezad wanders into a Parsi fire-temple merely for a moment of soothing nostalgia...

...The male characters are subtly drawn, the female broadly illustrative...

...I must save my soul...

...To make matters worse, his uncensored memories bring to light long-festering secrets that stir up latent resentments...

...Coomy is a cardboard caricature, nasty, miserly, and scheming...

...Distracted from his studies, Jian innocently wonders what might have caused the professor's stroke...

...Obviously a stroke does not require psychological causes...

...By so doing, I defied a prescribed fate like my teacher's...

...he simply needs relief from personal frustration...

...The persona becomes indispensable if Western poets intend to communicate and commiserate with others without exposing themselves vulnerably...

...Both concentrate on domestic situations scrupulously etched against a dense political and social background...

...like a free man capable of choice, to dislodge myself from the revolutionary machine...

...They have cunningly maneuvered to bring about the collapse of his career and marriage plans, along with the professor's downfall...

...The truth is that all people in the humanities are clerks and all people in the sciences are technicians...

...Kapur, he reports-falsely-that the dreaded Shiv Sena racketeers have come by to extort protection money...

...Or perhaps he was taking on the personas he refers to in Western poetry, indispensable to communicate without exposing oneself...

...Like passages in Mistry's novel, this is far too explicit...

...What kind of teacher is that, as foolish at the end of his life as at the beginning...

...In between urging Jian to study for his PhD exams, however, he disavows poetry ('"It's full of lies...

...Religious bigotry and parental authority are the culprits, assisted by Nariman's ingrained passivity...

...At an art gallery, he sees a painting of a poet, an "emaciated man in a tattered cloak," who "seemed to be yearning to chant something, but unable to bring it out...

...His visits soon become an escape, a habit, a necessity, an obsession...

...Life is stifled by endless bureaucratic regulations and restrictions on personal choice, surveillance of behavior and speech, exams that require the spouting of predigested political slogans...

...The root cause of the family's misery, though, as we discover through Nariman's musings, is unambiguous...

...Although Mr...

...Nariman caved in to their pressure and gave up Lucy, his great love...

...Kapur challenges them and is killed, and Yezad is left unemployed and tormented by guilt...

...Ha Jin has drawn a Hobbesian society where no one can be trusted, only the canny survive, and truth is lethal...

...Their new books use a remarkably similar design to unravel the social fabric of the last few decades in Bombay and, in Ha Jin's The Crazed (Pantheon, 323 pp., $24.00), a Chinese provincial university town...

...Everybody was surprised when Professor Yang suffered a stroke in the spring of 1989...

...And nine-year-old Jehangir is taking bribes to help his classmates with homework...

...moreover, the professor's stroke "seemed quite unusual, not accompanied by aphasia-he was still articulate and at times peculiarly voluble...

...But Yezad himself is far from immune...

...When he forbids his older son, now 18, to see a non-Parsi girl, history appears ready to repeat itself...

...When Nariman breaks his ankle and cannot get out of bed, Coomy, unwilling to care for him, deposits him in the already cramped home of his daughter and her half sister Roxana, and her husband Yezad Chenoy...

...At first the virtuous Chenoys welcome Nariman...

...He barely resists the temptation to steal from his benevolent employer, Mr...

...Family Matters' best features are the stunning panorama of anarchic Bombay, and the agony of Yezad, a decent man overcome by circumstance, who retreats from intelligence to parochialism...

...Ha Jin left China in 1985 to study in the United States and teaches in Boston...

...At loose ends, Jian joins a group of students going to Beijing to demonstrate for reform...

...An old man-a professor of literature in each case-lies ill and deteriorating...

...This painting made me wonder whether there had been an oversight on the part of the authorities that had allowed it to be included...

...He requires the kind of attention that irritates and disrupts his family...

...Another lie with tragic results: The real Shiv Sena turn up, the outraged Mr...

...Tell me, who is a really independent intellectual, has original ideas and speaks the truth...

...Nariman, sick with Parkinson's disease, is a widower who long ago was coerced into an unhappy marriage...

...On Fiction Emigrés Looking Homeward By Lynne Sharon Schwartz ROHINTON Mistry and Ha Jin are transplanted novelists who write about their native lands with bracing acuteness and a rueful mix of exasperation and sympathy...

...What finally pushes Jian over the edge is a visit to the countryside on a bureaucratic errand-really a wild goose chase-for Secretary Peng...

...Kapur...

...But Lucy, mad with disappointment, refused to disappear...

...He let the mail flow through his consciousness, allowing the episodes to fall into place...

...The conflict between personal aspiration and social repression wrecks the lives of Professor Yang in The Crazed and of Nariman Vakeel in Family Matters...

...The skein of lies leads inexorably to disaster, yet as Mistry deftly shows, assigning responsibility is tricky...

...Collectively and blindly, the characters engineer their own doom...

...Yezad, who shares his antipathy to religion, enjoys his father-in-law's sharp and ready wit, and the two affectionate grandsons delight in his stories...

...The damage reverberates through their descendants...

...Shortly after Mr...

...And not until days later, when he must destroy his ID card, change his identity and flee, does he see the connection between personal and political freedom: "I indeed acted like a counterrevolutionary: I aspired...

...Professor Yang's wild utterances, Jian's preternatural naïveté, and the bleak, insular room itself-overlooking a "mountain of anthracite" in the backyard, while the hospital's unseen front yard "resembled a garden or park"-combine to create a surreal atmosphere...

...Belatedly, he understands that he too has been the target of Secretary Peng and other faculty members' machinations...

...Since the professor's wife and daughter are away...

...Secretary Peng of the Literature Department assigns Jian the task of tending his future father-in-law each afternoon...

...Either way, political repression and inner conflict have undone him, leaving jumbled fragments of speech, the shards of a self...

...Jian dreams that Meimei is trying to feed him with a spoon, but he cannot open his mouth, "as if my lips had been partly sewn together...

...At the same time Yang is capable of cogent literary lectures from his sickbed, the most telling-for his own plight-being on the use of the persona in Western poetry...

...The family becomes a microcosm of the larger setting's struggles and contradictions...

...In their previous work (the latter's Waiting and Under the Red Flag, Mistry's A Fine Balance and Such a Long Journey) Ha Jin's exasperation has been the less forgiving, his sympathy the more constrained...

...Indeed, to delay Nariman's return home, Coomy gets Jal to shatter their ceiling with a hammer, then complains that the roof has fallen in, a black-comedy ploy with tragic results...

...The shock of hearing raw truth instead of ritual platitudes brings inner turmoil and images of speechlessness...

...More than voluble, his speech is eerily inconsistent, subversive and threatening to Jian's settled plans for a stable academic career...

...Soon he's drawn into outright betrayal...

...His motives are apolitical, he claims...

...he cries, and with good reason...

...Money is painfully scarce, even though Yezad works hard as manager of a sporting goods store...

...Professor Yang's student and prospective son-in-law, Jian, who narrates The Crazed, finds himself unexpectedly implicated in his teacher's fate through a web of lies and betrayals...

...like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope...

...He had always been in good health, and his colleagues used to envy his energy and productiveness...

...This decision causes havoc...