‘Disinheritance’ by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Mohan Gulrajani
Fiction: ‘Disinheritance’ by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Plus Thomas McGuane’s ‘A Wooded Shore’ and Cynan Jones’s ‘Pulse.’
By
The cuckoo is a parasitic bird that deposits its eggs in the nests of other birds, who then raise its hatchlings with their own. Imaginatively, this is where the writer must be: embedded in the private worlds of other people. For Jhabvala (1927-2013), this came naturally; hers was a life of permanent exile. Born into a German-Jewish family in Cologne, she fled to England in 1939. After university, she married an Indian architect and moved to Delhi, where she raised a family and began a prolific fiction-writing career. Years later she uprooted again, this time moving to New York, where she settled close to Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, the filmmaking team for which she wrote more than 20 screenplays, two of them Oscar winners.
“Disinheritance” is the second posthumous selection of her short stories, following “At the End of the Century,” from 2018. The stories here appear chronologically, the first published in 1957, the last from 2011. Apart from “A Birthday in London,” set in an English Parlor room, and a few in New York, they take place in India, the country that most roused Jhabvala’s outsider’s affection and inspired her best books.
Like Mavis Gallant and Lawrence Durrell, Jhabvala set many stories within the international milieu of diplomats and civil servants. “In Love with a Beautiful Girl” is about one such Westerner, who is accustomed to gallivanting between exotic posts until he falls for, and becomes desperately enslaved to, a coy, acquisitive Indian woman. In “Lekha,” the prim spouse of a government administrator is scandalized by her brother-in-law’s affair with the department head’s flighty young wife. Passion is the great agitator of social norms. When the narrator’s brother-in-law speaks too frankly, she reflects that what he said, “was true, but I didn’t think it was right for him to say it.”
A pouty, teenage bride-to-be is the humorous focus of “Before the Wedding.” (“Really,” the girl decides, “one’s own wedding was the dullest of all.”) “A Very Special Fate” is a brutal depiction of an Englishwoman being played upon by a dashing Indian guru. Sometimes Jhabvala needs only a few sentences to make a character indelible, as with the imperious matriarch of “Foreign Wives,” a story that returns to Delhi’s westernized upper crust: “Mrs. Clara Paniwala, trim, blond, fifty-five if a day, and wearing a skintight, poison-green silk dress, stood in the doorway, one hand on her hip: ‘Dreadful,’ she pronounced.”
Because these portrayals are so acute and unsparing, Jhabvala is sometimes described as a satirist. To my eyes, however, the human follies she evokes are all too realistic. To spy on a private world is to observe the truths people most want to keep hidden. Jhabvala disclosed those truths with candour, sensitivity and wit.
Thomas McGuane continues his late-career short-story renaissance with “A Wooded Shore” set in a Montana rarely mythologized in westerns. Mr. McGuane’s hapless heroes are local politicians, insurance salesmen, small-town lawyers and other workaday hustlers’ intent on “getting somewhere among people going nowhere.” Their problem, apart from their provinciality, is attractive women. Either the men are incompetently pursuing them, as in “Retail,” or struggling to hang on to them, as in “Slant Six.”
Mr. McGuane relates these characters’ farcical miscues (and occasional dumb-luck victories) with a shrugging sense of humour and a knack for great lines. In “Crazy About a Mercury,” a man says of his roughneck wife, “I thought she was slapping herself in the face in the bar where we met, but it was how she eats peanuts.” In “Wide Spot,” a state legislator knows there isn’t much glory to his job—but “as my dad, an alcoholic dentist, used to say about staring into dirty mouths, ‘It’s a living.’”
The minor details have flair as well. Folks congregate in a barber shop called The Frill Is Gone. A development for wealthy out-of-towners with second homes is known as Snob Hollow. These stories are endlessly good company, even when everything in them is falling apart. As a character in “Not Here You Don’t” counsels, “the situation is hopeless but not serious.”
The Welsh author Cynan Jones writes about what, in his collection “Pulse” he calls “primeval disquiet,” the fear one feels when exposed to the savagery of the wilderness. Some of the characters in these stories have gotten on the wrong side of the animal kingdom, such as the man in “Peregrine” trying to steal falcon chicks to sell on the black market, or the hunter in “Reindeer” who has been hired to shoot a marauding bear. In the title story, the force of nature is a storm that descends upon a house in the forest with the violence of a murder.
Mr. Jones heightens the sense of unease with a style that favors sparsity and acoustic alertness. The paragraphs are brief, often only one sentence long. The sensory details are hyperattentive to noise. We hear “the strangled ungulate blurt” of a distressed elk, “the ruminant crunch” of a grazing sheep. Elsewhere Mr. Jones describes “the spiff of excess air” from a pressure valve, “the horrible graunch of the car door” and “the prip prip prip of postage stamps parting from their perforations.”
In a noticeable moment from “Cow,” a farmer baling hay strikes his pitchfork against a stone. The ringing sound “belled through the grum of the tractor that grundled up from the collecting yard.” At these times Mr. Jones seems to be aiming for pure onomatopoeia, a language that wholly reproduces the aural texture of rural life. These are stories that one reads with the ear as much as with the eye.
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Appeared in the December 6, 2025, print edition as 'Characters in Close-Up'.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/fiction-disinheritance-by-ruth-prawer-jhabvala-cf6db9b0
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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