'' MEN LIKE OURS '' : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

A tribute and a skewering in one : "Men Like Ours," By Bindu Bansinath. It's hard to see clearly, and write honestly, about the places you've left behind.

It requires a cold heart, even in fiction. You're going to blow up certain bridges you've crossed. This is why some writers are better after their parents have died.

Philip Roth took a lot of grief, for example, after the publication of '' Portnoy's Complaint,'' for depicting Jews in suburban New Jersey in ways they thought lent credence to odd stereotypes : overbearing mothers, emasculated fathers, guilt-ridden sexuality.

He was declared to be '' bad for the Jews.''

V.S. Naipaul was touchy about coming from Trinidad and, in his fiction and nonfiction, frequently expressed contempt for his homeland. 

He especially disliked what he called its unlettered, uncreative society of '' mimic men ''. He was loathed in return.

Along similar lines, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan have been ticketed for stock negative portraits of Asian men in their fiction.

It wouldn't surprise me if Bindu Bansinath's bold and darkly comic first novel, ''Men Like Ours'' kicks up a Roth-like fuss, or at least semblance of one, in the suburban New Jersey enclaves known collectively as Little India, in Middlesex County, where this novel is set and near where Bansinath was born.

These places are dense with immigrant strivers. The long string of exceptional South Asian restaurant that line Oak Tree Road, a hectic commercial strip, are the best, it's been argued, outside Delhi.

In many respects, ''Men Like Ours'' is a love letter to this area, and to the pluck and tenacity of a generation of South Asian women who were smart but poor and brought to America in arranged marriages.

Bansinath sometimes narrates in the first person plural, as Jeffrey Eugenides notably did in '' The Virgin Suicides.''

'' We arrived at the homes of men like ours in the late 80s and 90s. Men like ours were last resorts,  garden-variety men ; if our small dowries hadn't undermined us, they would have stayed bachelors forever.

We came to them from faraway cities and forgot the shapes and bustle of our hometowns.

The specifics of our history didn't matter here. The degrees that we earned elsewhere fell to the wayside. ................  We need to know only how to set their tea, how to boil ourselves down into plain white rice. ''

The World Students Society thanks Dwight Garner.