Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's achievement as an author of short stories rests in her ability to transmit the ambiguity and alienation of modern life. Her skillful narratives--whether set in India, London, or New York--are distinctive in their stylistic tendency to reach epiphany through the revelation of character in the moments her players come face-to-face with the limits of life. Jhabvala usually chooses to avoid the traditional narrative structures where the story is designed around the piecemeal disclosure of plot over a period of time. Instead she takes the reader deep into her characters and juxtaposes their responses to an event or displays their ironic misrepresentations of the world around them. Her stories often seem sliced out of the continuum that is life and avoid the deliberate dramatizations that seem to accompany more-conventional beginnings and denouements.

Although her narrative structures are innovative, she seems to skirt the deliberate linguistic experimentation...