The "East" of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's East into Upper East refers to India's sprawling metropolis, New Delhi; the "Upper East," not surprisingly, is that other big city, New York. In this short-story collection, Jhabvala explores the nature of love on two continents. The first tales take place in India. In "Expiation," the narrator, an affluent cloth broker, must deal with a much beloved but mentally unstable younger brother. Many years of closing his eyes to the evidence of his brother's delinquency eventually puts the entire family at risk. In "Farid and Farida," a marriage that had soured when transported from India to London reanimates in an unconventional way when the two estranged spouses meet again years later under a Banyan tree in India. Jhabvala moves from the six stories set on the subcontinent to New York with "The Temptress," in which an Indian holy woman is literally imported to the States by a wealthy American. From there, the author delves into the lives of Manhattanites. In "Fidelity," for example, Dave, his wife, Sophie, and his sister, Betsy, live in a symbiotic relationship stronger than betrayal, disappointment, and even death.

The subtitle of Jhabvala's collection is Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi, and plain they are--if by that you mean stories that are straightforward in the telling. This is not to say, however, that they are not subtle. Jhabvala's characters are multifaceted and the situations in which they find themselves complex. In East into Upper East she proves once again that a complicated story can be plainly told, yet resonate all the more powerfully for its simple elegance and economy. --Margaret Prior


From Publishers Weekly
The author is too modest. Written over a span of 20 years, the 13 stories gathered here (five of which have appeared in the New Yorker) are not "plain" at all. Rather, they're rich in character, observation and insight. The "Upper East" of the title refers to the Manhattan neighborhood; the title itself may echo Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills. Novelist (Out of India) and screenwriter (A Room with a View) Jhabvala depicts characters struggling to reconcile dependency and accommodation in their relationships. Enmeshed by financial and emotional need, her upper class Indians and New Yorkers go to extremes to oblige companions, families and lovers. In the opening story, "Expiation," a New Delhi man reflects guiltily on his responsibility toward his youngest brother, executed for murder. In one powerful New York story, "A Summer by the Sea," a woman with inherited wealth supports her husband's family while tolerating his infidelity with young men. The New York real estate agent in "Great Expectations" allows a family of strangers to take over her life, and the wife in "Fidelity" would rather die than let her unfaithful and criminally conniving husband return to jail. Acute as the New York narratives are, the New Delhi stories are both broader and deeper, perhaps because they are set against, and in part describe, the dramatic changes that have occurred in India over the last 60 years. Jhabvala deftly captures the dilemmas of people who straddle cultural divides: occidental and oriental, colonized and "free," traditional fealties and market capitalism. Her stories are "plain" finally because they are never flashy or postmodern. Instead, they study the wellsprings of character and the pressures of society that make people behave in often self-destructive or hurtful ways. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Jhabvala, best known for her Merchant-Ivory screenplays and her Booker Prize- winning novel, Heat and Dust (1983), here presents 14 short stories. Written over a 20-year period, they are set in locales as diverse as New Delhi and New York. Jhabvala characters, drawn through expert observation and unique insight, experience universal struggles and triumphs, whether they're in a crowded bazaar in an Indian city or a Manhattan apartment. Jhabvala conveys most effectively the psychology of the family, including the fragile and emotionally charged relationships between mothers and sons and between fathers and daughters. Her collection offers a skillful blend of East and West and a profound understanding of the collective trials of the human experience. Highly recommended.ADianna Moeller, WLN, Lacey, WACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Deborah Mason
...East Into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi, written over the last 20 years, reaffirms her as a spell-binding urban fabulist.


From Booklist
Drawing on the author's own culture-bridging experience, the first group of her stories, "East," is set in New Delhi, while stories in the section called "Upper East" are set primarily in New York's Upper East Side. In the New Delhi stories, characters are mostly educated and affluent Indians grappling with changes wrought by independence. Sumitra, in the story "Independence," becomes a kind of guide and hostess for men who have newly come into power. Sunil, in "Farid and Farida," is a new kind of businessman, marketing "Indianness" abroad. The first story in the next section, "The Temptress," provides a perfect transition, for it centers on Ma, an Indian holy woman of sorts who is imported to New York by a rich American. All but the last of the remaining stories are firmly grounded in the U.S., and it is in these stories that Jhabvala's keen insights into the complexities of human relationships become even more evident. These finely nuanced stories show that human love and need take many different forms. Mary Ellen Quinn


The New York Times Book Review
"Each story reveals Jhabvala's mastery of the form."


Book Description
Hailed as one of the best books of 1998 by the Los Angeles Times, this group of twelve short stories was written over the past twenty years. From the steamy streets of New Delhi to New York's tony Upper East Side, Jhabvala's characters grapple with the universal quandaries of the human experience-jealousy, passion, temptation, and deception-truths of life and love that follow no matter where we wander.


About the Author
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born of Polish parents in Cologne, Germany. She started school when Hitler came to power, and moved to England with her family in 1939. In 1951 she married Indian architect C.S.H. Jhabvala and moved with him to India. Jhabvala is the author of twelve novels, including Heat and Dust, which was awarded Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. She is a MacArthur Fellow, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A talented screenwriter, Jhabvala has earned two Academy Awards (A Room with a View and Howards End) with her work for Merchant-Ivory Productions. She is currently preparing a screen adaptation of The Golden Bowl. She and her husband divide their time between Delhi and New York.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This collection features short fiction from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a brilliant writer whose work is compared with that of Chekhov, James, and Austen. Written over the past 20 years, these engrossing stories are domestic tapestries, threaded with the emotional lives and complex psychologies of intense lovers, quarreling married couples, weary elders, and their restless adult children.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The author is too modest. Written over a span of 20 years, the 13 stories gathered here (five of which have appeared in the New Yorker) are not "plain" at all. Rather, they're rich in character, observation and insight. The "Upper East" of the title refers to the Manhattan neighborhood; the title itself may echo Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills. Novelist (Out of India) and screenwriter (A Room with a View) Jhabvala depicts characters struggling to reconcile dependency and accommodation in their relationships. Enmeshed by financial and emotional need, her upper class Indians and New Yorkers go to extremes to oblige companions, families and lovers. In the opening story, "Expiation," a New Delhi man reflects guiltily on his responsibility toward his youngest brother, executed for murder. In one powerful New York story, "A Summer by the Sea," a woman with inherited wealth supports her husband's family while tolerating his infidelity with young men. The New York real estate agent in "Great Expectations" allows a family of strangers to take over her life, and the wife in "Fidelity" would rather die than let her unfaithful and criminally conniving husband return to jail. Acute as the New York narratives are, the New Delhi stories are both broader and deeper, perhaps because they are set against, and in part describe, the dramatic changes that have occurred in India over the last 60 years. Jhabvala deftly captures the dilemmas of people who straddle cultural divides: occidental and oriental, colonized and "free," traditional fealties and market capitalism. Her stories are "plain" finally because they are never flashy or postmodern. Instead, they study the wellsprings of character and the pressures of society that make people behave in often self-destructive or hurtful ways. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Jhabvala, best known for her Merchant-Ivory screenplays and her Booker Prize- winning novel, Heat and Dust (1983), here presents 14 short stories. Written over a 20-year period, they are set in locales as diverse as New Delhi and New York. Jhabvala characters, drawn through expert observation and unique insight, experience universal struggles and triumphs, whether they're in a crowded bazaar in an Indian city or a Manhattan apartment. Jhabvala conveys most effectively the psychology of the family, including the fragile and emotionally charged relationships between mothers and sons and between fathers and daughters. Her collection offers a skillful blend of East and West and a profound understanding of the collective trials of the human experience. Highly recommended.--Dianna Moeller, WLN, Lacey, WA

Deborah Mason

Each story reveals Jhabvala's mastery of the form: the sleek economy of words, free of heavy symbolism of easy judgments, that allows her to home in on small, telling details. -- The New York Times Book Review

Joanna Slater - Far Eastern Economic Review

...[H]er portraits of the compromises people make and the obligations they carry rarely miss their mark....You won't find a storybook ending in any of Jhabvala's tales, but neither will you find the certitude of the cynic. Most of all, Jhabvala is an observer. As readers, we are thankful for her unique perspective and measured gaze, which, though it may sadden and challenge us, never fails to enlighten.

Kirkus Reviews

From Booker-winner Jhabvala (Shards of Memory) comes 14 compressed stories (five published previously), mostly set in New Delhi or New York, in which themes of rivalry, family discord, and loyalty at odds with convention are explored with consummate grace and skill. For the six tales from India, the ministerial level of civil service in the generations living after Indian independence (1947) offers a frequent point of departure: In one story ('Independence'), a woman lends her expertise to arranging proper social functions for less sophisticated members of the new Indian ruling class, thereby rousing the scorn of her drunken poet husband, and finds a sweet but fitful solace in the arms of a general being groomed as Minister of Defense; in another, a college boy, expected by his mother to follow in the footsteps of her illustrious family, falters when his girlfriend's father, prominent in government, is forced from office in a bribery scandal (`A New Delhi Romance'). As for the seven New York pieces, a curious picture of life on the Upper East Side emerges as sex looms large to skew normal relations: A young wife watches as her husband pursues various men from their beach house, then has to put up with her mother falling head over heels for one of his conquests ('A Summer by the Sea'). Elsewhere, a daughter's preference for carpentry and the willowy clerk in a cheese shop is not what her frosty, chauffeur-driven mama had in mind ('Broken Promises'). The gem here, though, is set in London, where an emigre writer's struggle to balance a need for both his wife and his mistress is observed by his young granddaughter ('Two Muses'). Each piece of Jhabvala's worldly mosaicoffers precise, subtle views of people who are trying to make the best of their lives: their essential humanity remains compelling, even if their circumstances sometimes seem too much alike.