Meera Nair at Book Woman

The problem with subtlety in fiction is that it's often overlooked or ignored, impotent in the eyes of an impatient readership. Or boring. Subtlety doesn't work if it's too boring. In the case of the past decade's avalanche of Indian and South Asian diasporic novels and short stories, what was once a bona fide movement in this country is now a line of Indian authors waiting for the backlash and the subsequent critical slap on the hand: "This has become tedious. You're too timid. Too much magical realism. We don't care anymore that his mother lives with his family in the suburbs of New Jersey. Write about something else, please." The latest to get this news was the brilliant Amit Chaudhuri, whose Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence was just kind of tolerated when it came out in April. "It would be nice to report that this new book measures up to the standards it sets for itself," wrote William Deresiewicz in The New York Times Book Review. "In fact, it would be nice to report that Chaudhuri's novels measure up to the praise they've received. But Chaudhuri is a writer of narrow gifts -- gifts that made his first three novels often pleasant but rarely profound." Painful. But the point here is neither to contradict nor concur: It's to assure you that Meera Nair has eluded any such dismissal with her debut, Video: Stories (Pantheon, $21.95). It's subtle, yes; its stories, of course, are populated with middle-class concerns in both the U.S. and back in Bombay. And there is indeed some magical realism, especially in "The Sculptor of Sands." As for the title story -- which won the PEN/Amazon.com award for unpublished writers but was disqualified after the discovery of Nair's previous publication in the Threepenny Review -- Naseer sees some porn and wants his wife to re-create it, cracking open the issue of traditional marriage for all to see. "The Curry Leaf Tree" is set in Scottsdale, Ariz., where a couple comes to grips with having nothing in common, in the strangest of ways. Video is a little strange itself: a quietly defiant work of gentle emotion, modest but indelible, funny but often mournful. Nair's appearing at Book Woman, tonight (June 20), 7pm, to read from it.

Also, on Monday, July 24, at 7:30pm, at Barnes & Noble Arboretum, Dallas-based journalist Joyce King will read from and sign her devastating Hate Crime: The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas (Pantheon, $24).