SOURCE: "Other Voices, Other Rooms," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 261, No. 7, September 11, 1995, pp. 244-5.

In the following mixed review of Shards of Memory, Rauch calls the complex relationships of the novel part of a "paradox that … lacks depth."

In her twelfth novel, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala once again addresses the themes of family and history through the premise of a set of old papers. It's a method she cultivated many books and screenplays ago in her Booker Prizewinning Heat and Dust (1975), in which a woman discovers her late step-grandmother's scandalous letters and goes to India to investigate. As in Bharati Mukherjee's more recent Holder of the World (1993), the double-time plot can make for a refreshing reclamation of the past.

But not always. From a cache of scraps and scrawlings, Shards of Memory traces the lives of an American/British/Indian clan with Jhabvala's familiar multicultural ease. A pianist-turned-devotee...