SOURCE: "Playing Games with History," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. XI, No. 3, December, 1993, p. 15.

In the following review, Gornick complains (hat in Mukherjee's The Holder of the World, the "boisterous Hannah does in no way suggest the brooding Hester Prynne, and what Mukherjee has to say about repressed Westerners and sensual Indians is painfully familiar, not at all passionate or clarifying."

When a writer of serious purpose chooses to make imaginative use of genre writing—the historical romance, the science fiction novel, the mystery story—the reader feels compelled to ask: why? What is going to get said here, in this way, that would not otherwise have gotten said? How is this piece of artifice integral to the story that is actually being told? What internal urgency does the formal restriction serve? These are not rhetorical questions. The reader really wants an answer.

Bharati Mukherjee is...