SOURCE: "After the Raj," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. VI, No. 12, September, 1989, p. 17-19.

In the following excerpt, Ascher praises Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories and states that "one of the great joys, for me, of reading The Middleman is experiencing a world that generally remains just at the edge of my consciousness."

… In The Middleman and Other Stories Bharati Mukherjee leaves the zenana far behind as she writes with the rushed, rootless, naively cynical voices of Third World newcomers and those who get involved with them. The eleven stories in this swift-moving collection are about the immigrants filling US cities and campuses: they come from India, Iraq. Afghanistan, Trinidad, Uganda, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and they are all busy creating new ties and scrambling for a living, often in the shadier niches of the economy. As the narrator of "Danny's Girls," a Ugandan living...