By Matt Eckert

Rohinton Mistry's Flambé of a Book

In 'Family Matters' the Doo-Dah is Crapalactica

By Matthew Metaphor, 1/5/2003

"Family Matters" is Rohinton Mistry's "Starship Troopers." Like Dylan's landmark music wheel, Mistry's third novel is a twisting orange peel of intrigue. After the gargantuan sweep of his last novel, the much-acclaimed, Oprah-OK'd "A Fine Balance," Mistry focuses on little bitty matters that I don't quite understand. Shunning the large, political thingy of his earlier pages between two covers, Mistry trains his compassionate but brute force on family - which is, after all, in Engels's memorable phrase, the real weapon of mass destruction.

Set in Bombay much like the Gin, the novel deals with two issues that really scare and bother the middle-class Bombayites - the shortage of affordable housing and something else that I didn't read about because I got bored. Out of these Pentecostal concerns, Mistry has weaved and woved a novel that is possibly his most animated, subjective, and awesome look at human trials and tributaries.

What goes on is a crisis in the home of the Vakeel family. Nariman Vakeel, a retired professor of something and the old-ass leader of the family, has suffered a fall that has rendered him all broken up and icky-like. Nariman's illness brings to the surface the total bitchiness and crappiness felt by his middle-aged stepdaughter Coomy, who has an awkward name and made me chuckle every time she entered a scene.

But Nariman's illness is not only bubblicious, but it transcends the chooby, chum-chum dialect of the infinitesimal Jal. Enlisting the help of the compliant Jal, she makes up this deal where she can get Jal a free ticket to paradise, like the song, only not so much.

Nariman's unexpected arrival into the teeny tiny, itty, bitty, little, small apartment where Roxanna lives with her husband, Yezad, and their two young sons alters the landscape of her marriage. With all of this going on you wonder what is on TV and how you can get someone else to write a review of this malicious daffodil of a landers - flammel - bommel - jammer. Yezad's deep regret at having witnessed Jal making love to a fourteen-year-old chimpanzee would have made this book approachable for the last two hours, but no, now they're bickering over haberdashery and I wish I knew a word that rhymed with haberdashery.

There is also a subplot involving Yezad's desperate but fly-blown attempt to make some quick money, which is the closest Mistry comes to overt social commentary about the Ronald McDonaldland, corrupt, money-hungry city that is today's Bombay. In Vikram Kapur, Yezad's idealistic, fiercely secular boss, Mistry creates small pigeons out of origami that come to life as an army of android origami that set siege to the Khmer Rouge in 1970's Cambodia. But, of course this too does not occur anywhere in the book .

Indeed, for a novel that is rooted so deeply in Oprah-esque mutterings of "stop it, you're...hurting me" it really does hit home for me, being a chick in Bombay with a bunch of weird relatives defining the art of blah-blah-bling-bling-blang-blah.

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