Family Matters

Rohinton Mistry

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Just to get this out of the way: Steve Urkel is not a character in this novel. Here’s Rohinton Mistry, sitting in India trying to think of a name for his book, and how can he be expected to know that the name he chose is the same as that of an overly long-running sitcom featuring the good cop from “Die Hard” and some spastic hypernerd’s eternal crush on average-but-unattainable Laura?

You might, however, point out that the name and its attendant puns are kind of sitcommishly milquetoast, and you’d be right about one aspect of this novel: Its prose is competent, to be sure, but not stylish. No similes take your breath away, no descriptions make you reconsider things you see every day. What Mistry has written is a meat-and-potatoes novel, driven by character and plot, and both character and plotting in this novel are subtle and inventive enough to make up for any plainness in the language.

The action centers on Nariman Vakeel, aging stepfather of brother and sister Jal and Coomy, who are at best ambivalent about his existence but have been charged with continuing it. After Nariman breaks his ankle on an unsupervised walk (neither sibling thought to walk with him, instead forbidding him to walk at all), Coomy (with Jal’s acquiescence but not approval) looks for any means she can find to offload the burden of tending to him onto his daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad, and their two children Murad and Jehangir. Although he’s careful to work in the roiling society around them — it would be impossible not to — Mistry stays close to these seven characters, and by the end of the novel we feel close to them, as the author details both their material and psychological struggles via the patient accumulation of telling detail. We get into the details of Roxana’s menu planning and feel the privation; we learn exactly how the beauty of Jehangir’s teacher plays a role in inspiring him to do good; we see Coomy’s bitter self-regard in appalling detail, with awful thoughts tracked moment by moment, to the extent that by the end of the novel we can pity her.

When I read Family Matters on the subway going to work, I worried about the characters during the workday, and then I broke open the book as quickly as possible when I got out of my cube. I can think of no higher recommendation.

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