"The Management of Grief" was virtually universally acclaimed in North America. It is the poignant, closing story of Mukherjee's 1988 collection The Middleman and Other Stories, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction that year. Not all the stories in The Middleman received unmitigated praise; one reviewer disdained the collection's overall obsession with "sleaze spiced with violence" (Gillian Tindall in "East Meets West and Writes It" in The Times, April 26, 1990). Mukherjee and her supporters respond that such "unsavory" events and topics are the reality of North American immigrants. They praise Mukherjee for having the courage to honestly represent such realities in all their raw brutality.

In Middleman, Mukherjee writes from the point of view of several ethnicities: Vietnamese, Caribbean, Afghanistani, and Phillipino, to name a few. Johnathan Raban writes in the June 19th, 1988 New York Times Book Review, that these immigrants explode stereotypes; they...