Five Dollar Smile

This touching and funny collection of stories showcases Tharoors daunting literary acumen, as well as the keen sensitivity that informs his ability to write profoundly and entertainingly on themes ranging from family conflict to death. In the title storywritten in a lonely hotel room in Geneva soon after the author began his work with the United Nationsa young Indian orphan is on his way to visit America for the first time, and his anguish and longing in the airplane seem hardly different from those of any American child.Tharoors admiration for P. G. Wodehouse makes How Bobby Chatterjee Turned to Drink a delightful homage, while The Temple Thief, The Simple Man, and The Political Murder bring to mind O. Henry and Maupassant. His three college stories, Friends, The Pyre, and The Professors Daughter, are full of youthful high jinks, nave infatuations, and ingenious wordplay. The Solitude of the Short-Story Writer is a smart, self-aware, Woody Allen-esque exploration of a writers conflicted relationship with his psychiatrist.