Diane Andrews Henningfeld is an associate professor at Adrian College. She holds a Ph.D. in literature and writes widely for educational publishers. In the following essay, she examines Mukherjee's use of contrasts and unbridgeable gaps in "The Management of Grief."

Bharati Mukherjee's short story, "The Management of Grief" serves as the final story in the 1989 collection The Middleman and Other Stories. Mukherjee won the National Book Critic Circle Award for fiction for this collection, and in 1989, the story appeared in The Best American Short Stories, 1989, edited by Margaret Atwood and series editor Shannon Ravenel. Critics have continued to review the collection favorably.

Jonathan Raban, for example, in The New York Times Book Review, June 19, 1988, writes that Mukherjee's "writing here is far quicker in tempo, more confident and more sly than it used to be." However, although many critics and scholars comment on the quality of the...