SOURCE: "Call It Exile, Call It Immigration," in The New York Times Book Review, September 10, 1989, p. 9.

In the following review, Gorra discusses Mukherjee's expansion of her short story "Jasmine" into a novel and asserts "she's done so without losing a short story's virtues, above all its sense of speed and compression, its sense of a life distilled into its essence."

Bharati Mukherjee's third novel carries the same title as one of the best stories in her prize-winning collection of last year, The Middleman and Other Stories. That earlier "Jasmine" told of an Indian girl from Trinidad who "came to Detroit … by way of Canada … [crossing] the border at Windsor in the back of a gray van loaded with mattresses and box springs." Jasmine works first in an Indian-owned motel, then as an au pair. And by the end of the story she's learned to see herself, as she...