SOURCE: Langley, Lee. “Grim Home Thoughts from Abroad.” Spectator 288, no. 9060 (30 March 2002): 41.

In the following review of Family Matters, Langley praises Mistry as a writer who effectively weaves tragedy and vivid descriptions of everyday routine into his fiction.

In his last novel, A Fine Balance (short-listed, like his first, for the Booker), Rohinton Mistry dealt with a disparate group of losers thrown together at the time of Indira Gandhi's Emergency. Against a huge, Tolstoyan background, lives were destroyed in divers ways: accident, amputation, castration, violent death. Survivors teetered on a tightrope above the abyss. Heart-rending, tragic, the characters had a wild, Beckett-like humour; astride the grave, they got in the odd laugh.

The new novel, Family Matters, has a narrower focus, a family in Bombay today, and since as always, his locus is India, much of it takes place in that narrow space between penury and just enough to...