Seeking Fortune Elsewhere

September 1, 2021

From O. Henry Prize winner Bhanoo, this debut collection moves from Pittsburgh to Washington to Tamil Nadu as it illuminates the lives of South Indian immigrants to the United States and the families who remain behind. Throughout, Bhanoo focuses on women like a widow in a retirement community anticipating her daughter's visit from America and a put-upon wife who makes a bold choice of her own when she inherits a house.

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Starred review from November 29, 2021
Journalist Bhanoo’s stunning debut collection spotlights women who navigate comfortable but often stifling cultural traditions while pursuing new-world promises. In the O. Henry Prize–winning “Malliga Homes,” a recent widow’s daughter insists her mother move into a retirement facility in Tamil Nadu. The narrator’s daughter, Kamala, left India years earlier for college in Atlanta, and Kamala’s increasingly infrequent visits sadden and anger the narrator. In a perfectly apt metaphor for families caught between staying and going, the narrator pauses at dusk to admire a set of oleander shrubs: “Some of the flowers are stuck on one side while others, by sheer luck, fall to the other.” In “No. 16 Model House Road,” wife Latha and husband Muthu live in a house in Bangalore that Muthu’s deceased aunt had left to him. A developer wants to demolish the house for a high rise, and Muthu wants to sell it in order to travel, but Latha sees the house as “a memory box of her life.” Defying tradition, she stands firm in her opposition to Muthu with a “winning feeling” when, in signing a contract to remodel the house, her hand is “steady and sure.” In these and other stories, Bhanoo finds novel ways for her protagonists to cope with adversity. Growing apart from the past, rather than crushing their spirit and individuality, brings them freedom and hope for the future. This introduces a great new talent. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled the character Muthu's name.

Starred review from January 1, 2022
Eight distantly connected stories, mostly centering isolated women, comprise Bhanoo's exquisite debut. In the opening O. Henry Prize-winner, "Malliga Homes 3," a recent widow in Chennai is relocated to a retirement home by her rarely visiting Georgia-based daughter. "Nature Exchange" focuses on the Chennai widow's adult granddaughter, Veena, struggling with her young son's sudden death, the single fatality in a school shooting. Veena's father, the Chennai widow's son-in-law, appears briefly in "A Life in America" as the former mentee of a Washington State professor charged with coercively using his students as personal "slaves." Pullman, Washington, is also the location of "Buddymoon," about an estranged mother who returns for her older daughter's wedding. Pittsburgh provides the setting for "His Holiness," in which a high-school senior struggles to understand her father, who has abandoned his family and reinvented himself as a traveling self-help guru, and "Three Trips," which recounts the titular three (life-changing) trips taken by an Indian American and her fractured family. "Amma" and "No. 16 Model House" are paired through childhood friends; the former is about the proverbial new girl in school, who matures into a meteoric actor-to-politician career, and the latter features "the sweet twin" and her more ordinary decades. Bhanoo's piercing stories further augment the growing shelves of spectacular first short story collections by women of color.

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Starred review from January 1, 2022
Eight stories of dislocation--cultural and geographic, familial and romantic. An elderly woman parked in a "retirement-community-cum-old-age-home" in Coimbatore, India, by her well-meaning daughter, who lives in the United States, tells a lie that restores a little of her agency but also underscores how empty her life has become. A mother realizes that she has not been invited on her daughter's buddymoon, a recent fad of newly wedded couples heading off on honeymoons with friends and family, but her ex-husband's girlfriend has. A professor is accused of taking advantage of his graduate students, all Indian immigrants like him, by asking them to do chores around his house. Bhanoo, a longtime newspaper reporter, homes in on devastating moments of loss--the results of aging, cultural misunderstanding, so-called progress, fickle hearts, and even tragedy--throughout this stunning debut collection of stories. The professor, who sees himself in his graduate students, thousands of miles from India, completing their studies in small college towns like Bozeman, Montana, can't reconcile his sense of himself as treating them "like family, because their own families were so far away" with the charge that he took advantage of them. In "Nature Exchange," a wrenching story about a woman whose son was killed in a school shooting, Veena returns obsessively to the nature center where children can trade found objects like sand dollars and dead insects for points to be redeemed for prizes. Before his death, her little boy was saving up for a pair of antlers. Now, as she struggles to move on with her life, Veena fixates on the antlers as though they might free her from her grief. These are psychologically astute stories--and also riveting. By carefully withholding key details, Bhanoo transforms human drama into mystery. Graceful stories by a writer with enormous empathy for even the most flawed and forlorn among us.

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