It has taken Rohinton Mistry over six years to come up with a worthy successor to his astonishing novels A Fine Balance and Such a Long Journey.

Again he delves deep into the everyday life of an Indian family. Nariman Vakeel is a retired English teacher in Bombay suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. When an accident renders him bedridden, his stepdaughter Coomy and her weak brother Jal, who have been looking after him for years, begin to think of ways how to unburden themselves of the increasing strain. The opportunity arises, and they deliver him into the care of his daughter Roxana and her husband Yezad, who are married with two children and live in a tiny flat. As his illness proceeds, the family tries to find arrangements to handle the claustrophobic conditions and make them bearable. In their determination to prolong the stay of Nariman interminably, Jal and Coomy resort to desperate measures. Being a Rohinton Mistry book, this sets into motion other and often unexpected developments.

Mistry proves himself as a masterful chronicler of the precarious life of the middle classes in India, skillfully treading the fine line between sentiment and sentimentality. His novels are full of the stench of life. His prose is as fluid and engaging as ever. The portrait of Nariman, dying with as much grace as he can muster, is moving and believable, as is the cluster of family relationships and the various ways in which characters get into trouble as they try to secretly tend to one another’s needs. Mistry’s instincts are the quieter ones of the social realist, recalling Zola, or even Flaubert, with their ambitions to depict the true nature of society.

Mistry is a meticulous plotter as well as a meticulous observer, his narratives ticking on with almost clockwork efficiency, a skill that lends the mechanics of his novels a certain awful inevitability. And while this inevitability is part of the reason for their capacity to draw the reader in so powerfully, there are moments when it also means that the machinery can be heard grinding away in the background. Yet even when this is the case, there is nothing contrived, and the novel remains true to some inner emotional integrity.

A previously unfamiliar, and very amusing and welcome addition is his open criticism of the unhealthy influences of western consumerist culture, and the often naďve, even blinkered views of Western intellectuals. It’s disconcerting to have the author appear to launch into a defence of his last novel from within a work of fiction, no matter how apt the defence might be. The target appears to be Germaine Greer, who publicly complained that she didn’t recognize the “dismal, drear city” portrayed in A Fine Balance. The “fictional” comments become highly pointed:

“One poor woman . . . made such a hash of it . . . You felt sorry for her even though she was a big professor at some big university in England. What to do? As T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’.” It seems that Mistry has either become more optimistic since writing A Fine Balance, or, even as he fumes at Greer’s arrogance, has taken Eliot’s advice to heart.

Personally my favourite remains Such a Long Journey, but there can be no doubt that the six-year waiting period for Family Matters was worth it.

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry Published by: McClelland & Stewart
Price: $39.99

Editor’s Note: We are happy to report that Rohinton Mistry has been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize.