International Relations: A Review of Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 Review International Relations: A Review of Rohinton Mistry=s Family Matters chelva kanaganayakam Rohinton Mistry. Family Matters Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 2002. 487. $39.99 I THE FAMILY OF THE NOVEL In Family Matters, Kapur, the owner of the sports store, recounts to his staff his response to a familiar scene of commuters in Bombay trying to find a foothold on overcrowded trains. Kapur=s intention is to demonstrate the cosmopolitanism and underlying humanity of a Bombay that, despite all its fanaticism and corruption, provides a haven to all those who drift into the city, regardless of caste, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. Kapur=s description of a passenger, however, serves more than a symbolic function: A train was leaving, completely packed, and the men running alongside gave up. All except one. I kept my eyes on him, because the platform was coming to an end. Suddenly, he raised his arms. And people on the train reached out and grabbed them. What were they doing, he would be dragged and killed, I thought! A moment later, they had lifted him off the platform. Now his feet were dangling outside the compartment, and I almost screamed to stop the train. His feet pedalled the air. They found a tiny spot on the edge, slipped off, found it again. (153) The complex aspects of this daily occurrence become evident later when Kapur attempts to board a train and fails miserably, discovering that travellers are less inclined to help someone who obviously belongs to an affluent class. The symbolic meaning Kapur attached to the scene is subverted by his own failure to mimic the feat of the anonymous traveller. But what is striking for the reader is the description itself: the language transforms the scene, divorces it from the referential context, and provides a moment of simple exhilaration. It is a moment when the language rohinton mistry=s family matters 919 university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 functions at its best, transforming a quotidian scene into something picturesque. The description, admittedly, borders on the exotic, but the self-consciousness with which the language is used affirms the disjunction between life and art, between literature as social document and literature as artifice. When language functions in this manner, with metaphor privileged over metonymy, the text assumes a measure of autonomy. It is in this that the narrative realism, for which Mistry is so well known, resembles its predecessor, the Victorian novel. In the best of Mistry=s writing, as in Victorian fiction, the quality of the prose asserts artifice over what is commonplace and brings to it a level of significance otherwise unavailable to realism. Thus a critic such as Laura Moss can defend Mistry=s use of realism (>Can Rohinton Mistry=s Realism Rescue the Novel?= Postcolonizing the Commonwealth, 2000) by rejecting the idea that universalism has to be attached, as it so often is, to realist practice. She quite rightly observes that >non-realist writing is frequently privileged by the critics because of the assumption that its various forms are inherently conducive to political subversion because of their capacity for presenting multiplicity= and argues that Mistry=s version of realism is not universalist, Eurocentric, or simply imitative, but intensely radical and subversive. Moss=s defence of Mistry=s mode serves as an important reminder that realism is not necessarily passé and that experiment is not by definition the most appropriate strategy for postcolonial fiction. Moss, however, may be doing Mistry a disservice when she attempts to distance him from a whole tradition of Victorian writing. Had Family Matters been more fundamentally a Victorian novel, it would have been a better twenty-first-century one. To be part of a literary tradition is not, in itself, a matter of regret. While there is hardly a need to subscribe to the ideology that frames the Victorian novel, the best of Victorian fiction survives because the quality of its prose asserts its artifice, even in the construction of character. Dorothea in Middlemarch is important not because she=s a >real= character but as a fictional one. It is on the level of...