SOURCE: A review of The Middleman and Other Stories, in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring, 1990, p. 363.

In the following review, Parameswaran discusses the stories in Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories.

Bharati Mukherjee's second volume of short fiction consists of eleven stories that are wide-ranging in both settings and themes. Following her self-proclaimed American identity stated in her first volume of stories, Darkness, she explores the American experience through various personae or protagonists, four of whom are white American males and six of whom are females (only three of the women are of Indian origin). The result is a curious mix of voices and experiences that go to make up the celebration of being American (as she states in Darkness) as opposed to being Canadian.

Mukherjee's explorations of male attitudes and diction are interesting as experiments. Alfred Judah, the protagonist of the title story, is a macho...