SOURCE: Jacob, Rahul. “Down the Stream of Stories.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (11 July 1993): 3.

In the following review, Jacob applauds the graceful and fluid stories in A River Sutra, arguing that each story adds dimension to the main focus of the novel.

There are a great number of us who are not quite able to believe in religion, yet are unable to embrace atheism, which seems “too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief,” as Salman Rushdie observes in The Satanic Verses, Caught in the middle, we have more doubts than certainties, more questions than answers. Neglectful of both Mass and mall, we seek a moral dimension to our lives by turning to books for counsel.

The notion of writers as a secular clergy is not a novel one, but Gita Mehta would seem an unlikely candidate for that literary pulpit. It was she, after all, who...