What is The Middleman?

The stories in this collection represent the multicultural world in which our incoming freshman will live out their professional lives. They will become actors and players on the complex and diverse stage of a global world in which business, technology, art and science are increasingly shaped by opportunities and conflicts around the world. In the course of their Drexel education, our students will have the opportunity to consider and confront the complex loyalties and the painful struggles that attend our ongoing attempt as Americans to understand our own diverse and multifaceted culture better while simultaneously adapting and strengthening our own individuality in a broader international context.

“The Management of Grief,” one of the stories in The Middleman collection, is based on the 1985 terrorist bombing of an Air India jet. In other stories:

An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle (Powells).

Mukherjee has won a National Book Critics Circle Award for this collection. She has often “been praised for her understated prose style and her ironic plot developments and witty observations. As a writer, she has a sly eye with which to view the world, and her characters share that quality” (Edwards).

Mukherjee writes as a person of Indian background and the culture she draws upon has the vitality of many thousands of years. However, her stories are not for a sub-group of our culture; they speak eloquently to all of us in America, as Koster notes. He points out, “The narrators and central intelligences of the stories are male and female, American, Italian-American, Hindu, and from a wide range of economic and educational backgrounds” (Koster). And the diversity of her characters is a direct result of Mukherjee's own definition of herself as a writer. It must come as no surpirse that people often classify her as an Indian-American writer, but she rejects this term because she feels it marginalizes her. She is not happy being defined as “other.” Instead, she likes to be referred to as an American of Bengali-Indian origin (Edwards). And, as Americans living in an exciting and troubled time, we will find many poignant scenes, characters worth knowing, and issues and questions to ponder in this work of Bharati Mukherjee.

"The Middleman and Other Stories." 29 July 2005. Powells.com. ‹http://www.powells.com/biblio/74-0802136508-0›. Powell's Books (Powells).

Edwards, Sylvia. "Bharati Mukherjee." 29 July 2005. Women's Lives. June 2003. ‹http://www.edwardsly.com/mukherjee.htm›. Longview Community College.

Koster, Raphael. "Insecurities and Hope: Bharati Mukherjee's Hybrids and the Role of Divider/Bridge." 29 July 2005. Raph's Page. ‹http://www.legendmud.org/raph/papers/mukherjee.html›.