New York Times (May 27, 2012)
Family Secrets
‘Aerogrammes,’ Stories by Tania James
By EMILY COOKE
Published: May 25, 2012
Tania James is a warmhearted writer. In “Aerogrammes,” her first story
collection, she treats her eclectic band of characters — several
children, a chimpanzee, an obsessive analyzer of handwriting, two
Indian wrestlers in Edwardian London, a former grocer, an aging dance
teacher, a widower, a writer and a ghost — gently, almost parentally,
pitying them while recognizing the humor in their predicaments.
AEROGRAMMES
And Other Stories
By Tania James
180 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
James writes fluent, formal sentences, and her language is often
artful. The skin of a boy who sells the chimpanzee has a “sweatless
sheen”; the woman who buys the animal strokes “the soft saucers of his
ears.” A story titled “ ‘The Scriptological Review’: A Last Letter From
the Editor,” which takes the form of a journal on handwriting analysis,
lets us encounter, delightfully, both a “castrated ‘y’ ” and a colon
magnified to reveal “the slight eyelash left by the lingering pen.” We
see the teeth of the newsletter editor’s mother “lacquered with wine”
and appreciate the difference between the strawberries she buys — those
from the grocery store “super-sweet diploid mutants,” the ones from the
farmers’ market “sour red nubs.”
Yet James’s writing sometimes sags under the weight of its own
lyricism, drawn down by ponderous metaphors or portentous language.
“What to Do With Henry,” about a young girl transplanted to the United
States from Sierra Leone who finds a brother in the chimp adopted at
the same time, ends in a dream recalled by the girl, in which she has
caught a bullet for him. As she begins to die, she takes comfort in his
companionship: “And though he could not talk, they were communicating
in a wordless language all their own, and he was thanking her, he was
telling her that he loved her, he was promising her that she was not
alone.”
Sentimentality can be understood as unearned feeling, emotion
overshooting whatever is supposed to have provoked it. Why something
may read as excessive varies. Perhaps the circumstances are too
familiar, or the situation lacks complexity; perhaps the sentiment
itself is overstated. The risk is even greater in writing about family,
that fount of nostalgia. James’s 2009 debut novel, “Atlas of Unknowns,”
a cheerful and sympathetic book, told the story of a troubled
relationship between two motherless sisters from Kerala, India. In
“Aerogrammes,” her interest in family, especially siblings, has
persisted. Pairs of brothers feature in two stories. Then there’s the
unconventional human-animal relationship in “What to Do With Henry.” In
each case, familial bonds nourish and constrict, thwart and comfort,
stimulating conflict and resolution.
When “Aerogrammes” stumbles it seems mainly a fault of the lyricism, as
if the temptation of grand language has lured these otherwise complex
and genuinely felt stories a step toward schmaltz. “I linger in the
still pool of his sorrow,” the child narrator of “The Gulf” says as she
watches her father cry. Are we to blame the weeping itself for the
line’s failure, or the way in which it’s described? “Sorrow” is a
lovely word, but we’ve come to use it to elevate sadness, and now it
sounds like sermonizing. “Linger” is similarly pretty, similarly fussy.
The “still pool” is stagnant language. Together, the words alienate us
from the very moment we’re supposed to feel most deeply.
The general lightness of James’s tone provides an opposite, astringent
effect. Her jokes tighten scenes with styptic doses of reality. In
these instants we are, as is so often the case, saved from
embarrassment by a sense of humor.
Emily Cooke has contributed to The Believer, The Millions and n+1.
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