Nom de Plume

You know, there are certain books that achieve critical acclaim less because of their content, and more because of their topic. This is one. It’s not bad–sections were movingly written–but it’s all so obvious. Basically, think of the overt misery and suffering of Rohinton Mistry–and then imagine those characters were female and interviewed by Oprah. That’s The Space Between Us in a nutshell, which follows the lives (told in a series of flashbacks) of Bhima, a slum-dwelling servant for whom things have gone from bad to worse, and her mistress Sera, an upper-class Parsi woman who suffered an abusive husband. The two women are intimately connected and share many of the same restrictions imposed by being female in Bombay–yet at the same time, there is an insurmountable chasm between them. Gender and class, class and gender. It’s just so boring. It gets so old. I felt like this was the literary version of a Hallmark card, something designed to elicit a very specific and predictable response.

So all in all, this wasn’t bad, per se — it was just completely expected (and sometimes a bit awkward). I just put Richard Powers’ Echo Maker on hold at the library, and was remembering the last Powers novel I read, The Time of Our Singing. Now that was amazing take on the race issue.