Short Story Review: “Earning Disapproval” by Shashi Bhat

[Prefatory note: Here at Bookbread I’m starting a new series, one where I will review short stories I’ve read. I’ll try to review one at a time (in about one paragraph), but possibly intersperse those singular reviews with commentary that compares and contrasts various stories. But I want to keep the general focus on one-short-story-at-a-time. Most of the things I’ll review were written in the last five years.]

Sashi Bhat’s short story “Earning Disapproval,” published in The Puritan magazine (Winter 2019), is a story that focuses much on an abundance of detail. This surplus renders for readers something between a sense of verisimilitude and nostalgia for the life of a Hindu Indian-Canadian girl in middle school during the mid-late ’90s.

Some of the details mentioned I recall from my own days in middle school–such as girls’ enthusiasm for the film The Craft (1996) and the slime toy Gak (which smelled awful) made by Nickelodeon.

Other details I wasn’t so familiar with, such as the narrator’s mention of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), a very popular Indian film I was unaware of; although, after watching a clip from it, I recognized the star Shah Rukh Khan from things I once watched for an Indian film class in college.

Overall, reading “Earning Disapproval” reminded me of a remark by critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933) when, in his essay on Milton, the critic mentions:

… the famous “Miltonic vague”—the preference of vast but rather indeterminate pictures, tinted with a sort of dim gorgeousness or luridity, as the case may be—to sharper outlines and more definite colours….
(Saintsbury, “Milton, § 22 His versification and style,” The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes, Volume VII: English Cavalier and Puritan, eds. A. W. Ward & A. R. Waller, (Cambridge UP, 1907–1921).)

“A sort of dim gorgeousness or luridity….” yet containing things with “sharper outlines and more definite colours” is the lasting impression I have after reading Bhat’s story. I find these traits in my own attempts at fiction, so perhaps I’m being overly critical of Bhat because of my self-awareness.