Aerogrammes

Starred review from February 6, 2012
Although most of the characters in these nine immaculately crafted short stories share a common native land—Kerala in southern India—their range of emotions is brilliantly diverse. Yet they all feel adrift in an alien culture, no matter how much time they have spent in the West. James (Atlas of Unknowns) understands the nuances of emotional displacement. In the title story, retired grocer Hari Panicker has a “hollow feeling... sitting in the fading light of a foreign room,” the retirement home where his son has consigned him. James displays a comic bent in “The Scriptological Review,” where a nerdy American teenager, Vijay, mourns his dead father by making his mother’s life miserable with his obsessive focus on producing a journal of handwriting analysis. There is poignancy in Vijay’s deep-seated fear of the culture that drove his father to suicide. In the moving “Light & Luminous” a middle-aged teacher of Indian classical dance is forced to include her ungainly, dark-skinned grandniece in a talent contest, leading her to discover that she shares the girl’s misery. Only the final story, “Girl Marries Ghost,” in which a grieving young American widow enters a lottery to marry a dead man, misses the target that the other stories unerringly hit. Agent: Nicole Aragi, the Aragi Agency.

March 1, 2012
A well-turned set of stories defined by emotional and physical separation, particularly in the Indian-American diaspora. James' fine debut novel, Atlas of Unknowns (2009), was a continent-hopping tale that tracked the divergent lives of two Indian sisters with wit and a lightly comic touch. Her debut story collection displays a similar approach, and she enthusiastically tests how her style can function in a variety of settings. The two most inventive stories study human emotions in nonhuman contexts. "What to Do With Henry" follows a chimpanzee's travels from Sierra Leone to the United States, where he builds an uncanny bond with a woman and her adopted daughter; as the chimp struggles for his place in a zoo's pecking order, James crafts a clear (but unforced) allegory of our own human strivings. Likewise, the closing "Girl Marries Ghost" imagines a society where people who are desperate for companionship can marry ghosts, who are eager to spend a little time back in the real world; James' portrait of one such marriage is a seriocomic expose of our craving for order set against our inability to let go of our messy pasts. The other stories deal in culture clashes, mostly featuring Indian Americans, but for James ethnicity isn't the sole source of conflict. The Indian dance teacher in "Light & Luminous," for instance, is defined as much by her sense of personal pride as her growing feeling that her art is out of step with the times. In the title story, the protagonist (who has the evocative last name of Panicker) is deciding whether his fellow nursing home residents are more embracing than his family. At every turn, James' prose is crisp, observant and carefully controlled; unlike the narrator of "Escape Key," who grows increasingly aware of his fiction's shortcomings, James projects a deep emotional intelligence.

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December 1, 2011

From the widower who resolves his grief by lovingly burying roadkill to a white woman who takes in her husband's illegitimate child from Sierra Leone and an orphaned chimpanzee, James examines people dealing forthrightly with setbacks. If this collection is as good as her accomplished Atlas of Unknowns, it will be good indeed.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2012
Fleeting ties and temporary alliances underscore James' zestful exploration of the elusive connections inherent to most relationships, be they parent-child, husband-wife, or teacher-student. In locations both exotic and banal, each of James' stories precisely delineates the impermanence of such associations while deftly appraising the joy and misery to be found in them. Long-sought-after fame and redemption are bestowed in a distressing way to an Indian wrestler competing for a world championship in the opening story, Lion and Panther in London, while an orphaned girl and a rescued chimpanzee form an unlikely bond as they separately struggle to attain a sense of belonging in the dazzling What To Do with Henry. Brothers bound by physical hardship gingerly cross painful emotional terrain in Escape Key, and a cantankerous, elderly widower discovers forbearance in the title story. Lushly exploring themes of identity and recognition, singularity and community, James crafts taut, complete worlds populated by complex yet recognizable characters who ultimately achieve catharsis and obtain enlightenment, often through unplanned and unconventional methods.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)