Book review / Spliced girls

As a new generation of British Asian writers - including Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal and Bidisha - charts "inbetweenness", there is a parallel burgeoning across the Atlantic. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is among a growing number of young American authors of Indian descent (such as Anjana Appachana, Indira Ganesan, Zia Jaffrey and Ameena Meer) who explore the meeting of two worlds through a perspective that derives from both.

Arranged Marriage won the American Book Award in 1995. Its short stories chart territory carved out in the fiction of Bharati Mukherjee (also Calcutta- born and California-based): the "immigrant dream" as it rubs against US reality; the fear and exhilaration as boundaries erode and traditions crumble; the lure and losses of rule-breaking. Despite a title that threatens uniformity, the arranged marriages are merely emblems of stricture. The focus is on women; the freedoms and illicit desires that a new life in "Amreeka" can stir in those shackled by inherited roles. Characters range from the traditional to the cosmopolitan, from the incipiently rebellious to those "Indian yet not Indian" creatures mocked on the subcontinent as "ABCDs" ("American-born Confused Desis").

As America tempts - "the neon Budweiser emblem winking on and off like a risky invitation" - a divorced woman quits spice-grinding for fast-food take-outs, a bride ditches saris to secrete her jeans from policing in- laws, and a daughter rehearses the words to tell a distant mother of a white boyfriend. Transplanted couples' expectations collide, as men revert to the "prehistoric values" a mother warns her US-raised daughter against.

Myths of womanhood control, but can sometimes liberate. In "The Maid Servant's Story", a woman views an aunt's tale as a warning: "A preview of my own life which I thought I had fashioned so cleverly, so differently from my mother's, but which is only a repetition, in a different raga, of her tragic song. Perhaps it is like this for all daughters, doomed to choose for ourselves, over and over, the men who have destroyed our mothers."

Divakaruni is no apologist for the American dream, eyeing the "Paki-bashing" of America's own "dotbusters" (after the red bindi on a married woman's forehead) and fatal muggings in the 7-Eleven. Resisting facile binaries of East versus West, she unpicks with irony her characters' mutual illusions and envies.

The modest realism of Arranged Marriage makes the failure of The Mistress of Spices all the more puzzling. In the novel, an old, village-born woman, once kidnapped by pirates and taught the secrets of spice-magic on a tropical island, runs a store in Oakland, California. Chatting to her wares ("Spices, what does this mean?"), Nayantara, or "star seer", divines migrants' ills and desires: "Green cards, promotions, girls with lotus eyes." Since her powers rest on celibacy, when she falls for a young Amerindian, doses herself with a youth elixir and beds him, the spices wreak revenge via the San Andreas fault. "Spices, I caused it," she moans, as the earth moves.

This drivel is threaded with "real" lives: Haroun, a servant turned taxi driver; Ahuja, a battered wife; Jagjit, a bullied schoolboy. None rises above cliche as the author attempts a lofty compassion to the "lost brown faces": "Garment factories smelling of starch and sweat and immigration raids, women handcuffed and piled crying into vans ..."

The compulsion to address a white American reader, latent in the stories, becomes blatant as the novel strives to explain. But pandering with fake folklore to New Age mysticism leaves its characters exoticised and diminished.