Failing better.
A Contrary review by Frances Badgett

        A reader could miss the giant flaw of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders once seduced by the author’s skill at evocation, his detail and clarity—once caught up in the drift of dust in Pakistan, the click of high heels on the veranda before a funeral, the shimmering border of a sari tucked just so under a woman’s knee. Mueenuddin isn’t just a brilliant stylist, he’s a masterful painter, capturing gestures and light, textures and glances with precision. Set among the landscapes of Islamabad, Paris, the rural acreage of Pakistan, Mueenuddin’s evocation of place adds dimension to the characters’ lives. Pakistan itself emerges as a character, with moods and changes, and this too adds dimension to this collection of linked stories.

        But therein lies the flaw: The structure of linked stories weakens the overarching narrative. Each story invites the reader to empathize with the characters’ strife and difficulty, then deposits the reader on the other side of their crushed hopes. Just as a story ends with the sadness of a suicide or the abandonment of a servant, another story awaits, glittering with the possibility of hope and redemption. This being a linked collection about dissatisfaction and unfulfilled desires, there is a purpose to this structure, to leaving the reader uplifted and bereft over and over. It is perhaps this reader’s failing to long for more connective tissue, more extension, more layers. But the abrupt ending and beginning from story to story produced more longing than satisfaction. Each story begins with great hope and ends in despair. And each is set around a wealthy feudal landlord, Mr. K.K. Harouni. It is through the characters’ varying relationships to Mr. Harouni—servants, children, business partners, lovers—that the characters connect. Rather than being connections of worth, the characters are bound by duty, obligation, station, and expedience. Each life is affected by the whims, decisions, and death of Harouni. But by depriving himself the novelistic leisure of connection and transition, Mueenuddin withholds too much from the reader, asking us to accept the stasis and pathos of the characters’ lives, unredeemed as they are by love, hope, ambition. Without the scope and stretch of a novel, Mueenuddin withholds the most powerful potential of his story: the reader’s deep connection to his book.

        That is not Mueenuddin’s only beautiful pitfall. As in many linked-story collections, one story outshines the others. In this collection, Lily is the most immediate, the most complete. Lily moves gracefully through the ponderous themes of modern and rural tensions, through the conflict between marital bonds and youthful indulgence, between traditional landowner and modern socialite. It draws the reader into Lily and Murad’s lives, and, as ever, into beautiful dust storms and late-night parties. Lily is so strong, so vivid, that a reader might suspect the rest of the collection is just back story for its crucial moment: “And what of her epiphany in the hospital room in London, the forgiveness she received, with the snow falling steadily all day? That at least was false, there was no moment of forgiveness, no renewal, just a series of negotiations, none of them final.” Evocative and painful, Lily encapsulates all the other work of the stories most effectively, all of their indefinite negotiations and false epiphanies. 

        It is no small challenge to write a collection of stories about dissatisfaction and failure and leave a reader satisfied. Unfortunately, Mueenuddin doesn’t. But while these stories lack the strength and layering of a fully realized novel, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders—through the beauty of Mueenuddin’s rendering—still enchants. Failing better than most, Mueenuddin creates an allegory of a Pakistan that is shimmering, graceful and cruel.


 

Frances Badgett is Contrary’s fiction editor.

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In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Daniyal Mueenuddin

2009, Norton

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SPRING 2009 COVER

GIRLS ON BIKES
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TALES OF THE DEVIL’S WIFE
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SILENT LAMBS
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EPITHALAMIUM
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CITY OF THE MILLION LIGHTS
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FROM THE EDITOR


REVIEWS
ROBYN SCHIFF
PATRICK DEELEY
ELIZABETH DIAMOND
DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN
LAUREN GROFF
ACHY OBEJAS
JIM HARRISON
JOHN ADAMS
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V.M. YEATES
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