Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Robbie Clipper Sethi

Like most of the slim volumes in the Twayne series, Ralph J. Crane's study of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala may serve as a fair introduction, though a new novel published in 1993 requires already a second edition. Crane focuses almost entirely on Jhabvala's novels, preferring to discuss a mere sampling of her short stories and treating them primarily as studies for her novels and as evidence of a theory of the development of Jhabvala's career that Crane bases on two autobiographical essays.

In focusing so exclusively on Jhabvala's novels, Crane's study does not represent the range of Jhabvala's work. He does not consider her 16 screenplays on the grounds that only two of them have been published; but all 16 of the films are certainly available, and, with a living author, one would think that some arrangements might be made to discuss unpublished work-especially since readers are apt to be familiar with Jhabvala as an Oscar-winning screenwriter.

Though best known for her screenplays and novels, Jhabvala began publishing her stories in The New Yorker in 1957 after the publication of her first two novels. In 1963 her first collection, Like Birds, Like Fishes appeared, following three more novels. In the same year, in her first collaboration with the producers/directors, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory (the Jim and Ismail to whom she dedicates her first collection), she wrote her first screenplay. She has published four more collections of stories, the last an anthology of stories that had appeared in her first four collections and an autobiographical essay that originally introduced her third collection, An Experience of India.

Crane's thesis maintains that Jhabvala's writing career systematically reflects her ambivalence about India, expressed primarily in her essay, "Myself in India." A Polish Jew born in Cologne, Germany, Jhabvala and her family fled the Nazis in 1939, settling in England, where she completed a Master's in English literature. In 1951 she married Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala and accompanied him to New Delhi, where she raised three daughters and began writing. In her essay, Jhabvala describes herself as "strapped to a wheel" on which she moves in stages from loving everything about India to hating it and back again. As a consequence, according to Crane, her first novels and stories tend to focus almost exclusively on Indians in India, while her latest work has been set in the West, with sometimes very little to do with India. Crane's theory helps to relate Jhabvala's latest novels to her early work about India, but it must treat as an exception an early New Yorker story that has nothing to do with India ("A Birthday in London"), which also appeared in her first collection. Moreover, Crane ignores other reasons, both biographical and historical, for Jhabvala's change in focus from Indians in India to foreigners and their various experiences of India. Though Crane carefully explicates Jhabvala's autobiographical essay as well as a lecture she delivered on receiving the Neil Gunn Memorial Award, he spends little time speculating on the effects of the expansion of Jhabvala's social contacts from the Indian family she lived with to her interaction with American and English filmmakers. Nor does he seem to be aware of the Indian perspective on the postcolonial "invasion" of Westerners in search of spiritual resurrection in the sixties, which Jhabvala's work, to a large extent, has interpreted for the West.

Crane's sources are as limited as his thesis, which is unfortunate, considering that he is writing about a living author. Even if Crane was unable to contact Jhabvala herself, he might have explored her unpublished work as well as the sociohistorical influences on her work. Though the Twayne volumes are not meant to be exhaustive, in comparison with James Harrison's study of Salman Rushdie, for instance, Crane is much less thorough and not nearly as insightful or experienced with the literature he writes about. Nevertheless, the volume contains a handy chronology of Jhabvala's work, though it omits significant moments in her fife, such as the birth of each of her children and the illness that may have contributed to her decision to settle in New York. Crane's bibliography may also prove handy for readers interested in learning more about this multicultural author. With her Jewish-German roots, having adopted the English language and thus become an English author, Jhabvala has been, as Crane correctly puts it, one of the major interpreters of India for the West; with her current residence in New York City and her latest interpretations of the United States, she is truly an author of the world.