Family Life
Akhil Sharma, 2014
W.W. Norton
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393060058
Summary
Hailed as a "supreme storyteller" (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice "as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky" (The Nation).
In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.
We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America.
America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them.
Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family’s new life.
Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 22, 1971
• Where—Delhi, India
• Raised—Edison, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; Harvard Law School
• Awards—O. Henry Prizes ("several"); PEN/Hemingway Award;
Whiting Writers' Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Akhil Sharma, an Indian-American author, was born in Delhi, India. He immigrated to the United States when he was eight, growing up in Edison, New Jersey.
Sharma studied at Princeton University, where he earned his B.A. in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School. While there, he also studied under a succession of notable writers, including Russell Banks, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, John McPhee, and Tony Kushner. He then won a Stegner Fellowship to the writing program at Stanford, where he won several O. Henry Prizes. He then attempted to become a screenwriter, but, disappointed with his fortunes, left to attend Harvard Law School.
Sharma is the author of the 2000 novel, An Obedient Father, for which he won the 2001 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2001 Whiting Writers' Award. His second novel, Family Life, was published in 2014.
He has also published stories in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Quarterly, Fiction, Best American Short Stories (anthology), and O. Henry Award Winners (anthology). His short story "Cosmopolitan," anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 1998, was also made into an acclaimed 2003 film of the same name, which has appeared on the PBS series Independent Lens. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2014.)
Book Reviews
deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core…Family Life is devastating as it reveals how love becomes warped and jagged and even seemingly vanishes in the midst of huge grief. But it also gives us beautiful, heart-stopping scenes where love in the Mishra family finds air and ease…I found Family Life riveting in its portrayal of an immigrant community's response to loss…But where Family Life really blazes is in its handling of Mrs. Mishra's grief. Sharma is compassionate but unflinching as he tells of this mother's persistent and desperate efforts to cope over the years
Sonali Deraniyagala - New York Times Book Review
Surface simplicity and detachment are the hallmarks of this novel, but hidden within its small, unembellished container are great torrents of pity and grief. Sedulously scaled and crafted, it transforms the chaos of trauma into a glowing work of art.
Wall Street Journal
I cannot think of a more honest or unsparing novelist in our generation.
Lorin Stein - Paris Review
Bracingly vivid… Has the ring of all devastatingly good writing: truth.
Molly Langmuir - Elle
[F]ine and memorable.
Meg Wolitzer - NPR
A heartbreaking novel-from-life… [Sharma] takes after Hemingway, as each word of his brilliant novel feels deliberate, and each line is quietly moving.
Maddie Crum - Huffington Post
Sharma spent 13 years writing this slim novel, and the effort shows in each lucid sentence and heartbreaking detail.
Stephen Lee - Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review,) The immigrant experience has been documented in American literature since those first hardy souls landed at Plymouth, and as the immigrants keep coming, so too do their stories. Sharma (An Obedient Father), who acknowledges the autobiographical elements in his new novel, tells a simple but layered tale of assimilation and adaptation. The Mishras come to America in the late-1970s, the father first, in the wake of new U.S. immigration laws and the Indian Emergency, when the narrator, Ajay, is eight, and his brother Birju is 12. There are lovely scenes of their life in Delhi before they leave, the mother making wicks from the cotton in pill bottles, the parade of neighbors when their plane tickets to America arrive. Sharma captures the experience for Ajay of being transported to a different country: the thrill of limitless hot water flowing from a tap; the trauma of bullies at school; the magic of snow falling; watching Birju, the favored son, studying hours each day and spending entire weekends preparing for the entrance exam at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. Then a terrible tragedy irreparably alters the family and their fortunes. Sharma skillfully uses this as another window into the Indian way of accepting and dealing with life. A loving portrait, both painful and honest. (Apr.)
Publishers Weekly
The Mishra family has a harder time than most adjusting to a new life in America in the 1970s.... The one drawback is that the last few brief chapters feel rushed after the more deliberate pace of the rest of the novel, which leaves readers wanting to know more. Verdict: This brave and honest work offers an unsentimental look at growing up and overcoming adversity when family life is very difficult indeed. —Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA
Library Journal
In Sharma's world, as in Leo Tolstoy's, unhappy families continue to be unhappy in different ways. In 1978, narrator Ajay's father emigrates from Delhi to New York to take a job as a clerk in a government agency, and a year later, his family joins him..... A moving story of displacement and of the inevitable adjustments one must make when life circumstances change.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel opens in the present, when Ajay is forty and his parents are elderly. How does this opening affect your experience of the rest of the novel, which takes place during Ajay’s childhood?
2. America is marvelous to the Mishra family at first. If tragedy hadn’t struck, do you think that America would have met the Mishras’ expectations for it? Or do you think that at least certain elements of their disillusionment were inevitable?
3. How does the Mishras’ status as immigrants affect their experience of Birju’s accident? How might their lives following the accident have played out differently if they weren’t strangers in a strange land?
4. What do you make of Ajay’s conversations with God following his brother’s accident? Describe the God that Ajay invents for himself. How does his God help him, and how doesn’t he? Can you pinpoint the moment in the novel when Ajay stops talking to God?
5. Describe the process by which Ajay becomes a writer. How does writing change the way he experiences his childhood?
6. In the aftermath of Birju’s accident, Ajay’s mother turns to religion and his father to alcohol. How are these two coping mechanisms different? Do you think they have anything in common? Do you think that Ajay’s own way of coping—academic success—has anything in common with his parents?
7. Did you find moments in Family Life funny, despite its darkness? What kind of humor does the novel possess?
8. Describe the prose style in Family Life. What do you think the author achieves through the candor and lack of sentimentality in his storytelling?
9. On the second anniversary of his brother’s accident, Ajay thinks, "I couldn’t believe that everything had changed because of three minutes" (page 129). What do you make of this? How does the brevity of the accident itself affect your experience of the passage of time in the novel, which takes place over many years? Has your own life ever changed so drastically, so quickly?
10. Compare and contrast the scenes when the family is awaiting news of Ajay’s college acceptances to the scenes when they are awaiting news of Birju’s high school acceptance.
11. Describe Ajay’s love life in high school and beyond. What is he seeking from his girlfriends? In what ways is he being honest with them, and in what ways, dishonest? How are his relationships with women affected by his experience with his brother? His experience as an immigrant? Describe some of your own high school relationships.
12. Family Life ends in a moment of ambiguity. "I got happier and happier," Ajay says. "In the distance was the beach and the breaking waves and the red seaplane bobbing in the water. The happiness was almost heavy. And that was when I knew I had a problem" (page 218). What is it about this moment and about Ajay’s happiness that tells him he has a problem? How would you describe his problem? Do you think he’ll ever escape or solve it?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)