Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Akhil Sharma

Genre:  Fiction

240 pages, published April 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Family Life, Akhil Sharma tells the story of the Mishra family.  It begins in India in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets and wait for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America.  America is everything that the Mishras could have imagined and more.  Older Birju studies hard and his work pays off with admittance to a selective charter school in New York.  However, before he can start, tragedy strikes and Birju is left in a brain-damaged state.  The family copes in different ways.  The father becomes an alcoholic, emotionally abandoning the family for solace at the bottom of a bottle.  The mother redoubles her focus on the older brother who is unable to respond to her.  Younger brother Ajay turns to writing and tries to match the academic achievement of his older brother.

Quotes 

“An elderly black man with gray hair said, “Every bottle should come with a warning: ‘This bottle may cause you to lose your job. This bottle may cause you to get a divorce. This bottle may cause you to become homeless.”

 

“I used to think my father had been assigned to us by the government.”

 

“During the coming days, the wealth of America kept astonishing me. The television had programming from morning till night. I had never been in an elevator before and when I pressed a button in the elevator and the elevator “started moving, I felt powerful that it had to obey me. In our shiny brass mailbox in the lobby, we received ads on colored paper. In India colored paper could be sold to the recycler for more money than newsprint. The sliding glass doors of our apartment building would open when we approached. Each time this happened, I felt that we had been mistaken for somebody important.”

 

“We have to keep trusting God. We can’t just trust God when he’s doing what we want. We have to trust him even when things are not as we would like them.”

 

“I had been nervous about not doing well in college. During my first class, I looked at the notes the boy next to me was taking. His supply and demand curves seemed more neatly drawn than mine. Nearly everyone appeared to have gone to preparatory schools and already knew such odd things as the fact that there was no inflation during the Middle Ages. Very few, however, were willing to work the way I did.  When I would come out of Firestone Library at two in the morning, walk past the strange statues scattered around campus, and then sit at my desk in my room till the trees in the yard appeared out of the darkness, I felt that I was achieving something, that every hour I worked was generating almost physical value, as if I could touch the knowledge I was gaining through my work.”

My Take

While I enjoyed Family Life, it did not fully deliver on the promise of the first 50 pages, getting bogged down in the mundane details of the Mishra’s day to day family life with a mentally impaired son.  Perhaps that is the point, but I found my interest flagging during this section of the book.  Sharma is a gifted writer, but I didn’t love this book.