Shards of Memory

Readers who enjoy Jhabvala's wry, insightful, cooly controlled novels (Heat and Dust, etc.) will find much to appreciate in this chronicle of successive generations of a polyglot family, spanning much of the 20th century. A grandmother in this quirky, endearing clan, called ``Baby'' by everyone, begins narrating the saga. Baby's father, Kavi, comes from a merchant family in India and spends his life in New York writing poetry about how he longs to return there, but never does. Baby's mother, Elsa, prefers to be in London, where she shares a stormy relationship with a female companion and becomes entranced by a spiritual guru called ``the Master.'' Baby, as idiosyncratic as the rest of her family, conceives her daughter Renata during a fight with her estranged husband. Renata, in turn, refuses to marry the father of her son, Henry, who wonders if the man sleeping on their living room couch is his father or whether his father is the Master, who knew of his coming before he was born. Jhabvala handles this highly sophisticated, complicated story with sinuous skill, evoking the family's world of shabby bohemian gentility while creating fascinating characters made more credible by her wise portrayal of their emotional states. Absorbing, too, is the relationship between East and West, as reflected in these characters' divided personalities. Though some jokes run on far too long and there is not enough dialogue between certain protagonists, Jhabvala searchingly explores the persistence of the ``odd shards and fragments of the past''--memories that form in the ``chrysalis of the mind,'' eventually ``to emerge and fly about on their own.'' (Sept.)