Experience leads the way in ‘Lives’

The current taste for reality -- or what passes for it (what could be less real than the contrived game-playing of reality TV?) -- seems to be giving the memoir a competitive edge over the novel. This, perhaps, may explain why Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s “My Nine Lives” is billed as “autobiographical fiction.”

By now we’re all sophisticated enough to understand how much invention may go into a “true” story, and how much real-life experience may find its way into a novel.

But some of us who are even more sophisticated have also had occasion to observe how this necessary conjunction of fact and invention can often serve as an excuse for some memoirists to indulge in plain old-fashioned falsehood.

Fortunately, in this particular case, the whole conundrum of autobiographical truth proves to be a red herring for the simple reason that, despite its billing, “My Nine Lives” is indubitably a work of fiction -- and a splendid one at that. Autobiographical? Certainly, but probably less so than “Jane Eyre,” “David Copperfield,” “Sons and Lovers” and a host of other great books proudly designated as fiction.

“My Nine Lives” consists of nine stories related to one another only in theme. Each of the stories is richly complicated, a veritable novel distilled into 40 pages or fewer. Each covers a lifetime, from youth to old age, and encompasses the many strange vicissitudes and unexpected turns occurring in the course of it. Some of the stories are set entirely in London or New York; others follow their heroines’ peregrinations between India and the West.

Each is narrated by a woman looking back on her life, sometimes with contentment, sometimes with resignation or regret but almost always without bitterness, no matter how few of her early hopes and dreams have been realized.

Many of the heroines are, like Jhabvala, the children of European Jewish immigrants, although one, the narrator of “A Choice of Heritage,” is (at least) half Indian. By almost any standard, let alone that of a modern-day feminist, they’re an amazingly unliberated set on the whole: romantic, idealistic, naive, credulous, self-effacing, other-directed yet, in most cases, still aspiring even in the wake of disappointment and disillusion.

Almost all have been engaged (either throughout their lives or at some point in their lives) in a quest that usually involves a man -- not just any man but one beyond the ordinary.

The happily married grandmother in “My Family” looks back upon her years of slavish devotion to a very married Heidegger-like German philosopher aptly named “Hoch”: “I cannot say that these excursions were the happiest hours of my life, but they were certainly the most ecstatic. It is impossible to describe the bliss of being with him, this stolid Prussian professor thirty years older than I, who after making love at once turned over on his side and went to sleep, snoring tremendously.”

In “Menage,” the narrator’s entire family -- her aunt, mother, father and she -- rearrange their lives to minister to the needs of a brilliant pianist.

There is irony, and comedy, in many of these situations, but it’s not often perceived by the characters themselves. Diane, who narrates “Gopis,” is an exception. When her young friend, Lucia, falls head over heels for a middle-aged Indian who was her own idol 20 years earlier, she’s amused and mildly astonished:

“Vijay was a shopkeeper, and maybe also a middleman in murky politics; he wore a shiny suit and too many rings on his hairy, handsome hands. But in retrospect, I see that it had not been difficult for me to identify him with the god celebrated in Indian dance and poetry. But what about Lucia? He was now nearly sixty years old, alcoholic, fat, and frightened. Sometimes he had to be helped to the toilet where he sat astride like a pregnant woman, groaning.... But Lucia accepted all this: for her, as for the gopis she wished to emulate, the transcendence of sex -- of the lover’s person -- was the essence of love itself.”

“My Nine Lives” presents a fascinating array of characters, settings and life experiences. Each of the stories functions as a brilliantly inventive variation on the volume’s central theme, but at the same time, each is substantial, distinctive, fully developed: complete in and of itself.

At 77, Jhabvala is writing at the top of her form, probing the deep questions of life and love with shrewd intelligence, rueful humor, compassionate understanding and insight tempered by long experience.