Our fall series began August 10 with a discussion of The Museum of Failures. Published reviews are mixed, but our group was unanimous in appreciating the novel. Everyone agreed that the plot is engaging and the characters compelling, and that the novel had us emotionally involved as well as intellectually interested.

Thrity Umrigar’s The Museum of Failures (Algonquin Books, September 26, 2023) follows Remy Wadia, a Parsi man who has built his adult life in America and returns to Bombay hoping to adopt a baby. What he finds instead is his estranged mother, Shirin, gravely ill in hospital, and a family secret that upends everything he believed about both his parents. The novel is at once a story of immigration, a portrait of a small and often overlooked religious community, and an argument for the necessity of telling the truth.

In an attempt to open discussion, I chided the group a bit for sneaking in a novel whose central protagonist is Remy, a young man in his thirties. Several members countered that Remy’s mother and father are also major characters — though we all agreed that Remy’s perspective dominates the novel.

We agreed that we learned a great deal about Parsi history and customs. Most of us knew far more about Hindu and Muslim faith than about Zoroastrianism when we began reading, and although this is not our first novel about immigration, it is the first told from the point of view of an upper-caste Indian family of wealth. Remy immigrated to America to get away from his mother, not to escape poverty, and he is the only member of his family or of his group of friends who does not stay in India.

Spoiler alert: the rest of this post discusses the novel’s central secret.

Our discussion focused primarily on Remy’s parents and on the crucial secret kept from him until his return visit, three years after his father’s death — a visit undertaken in pursuit of an international adoption rather than to see his estranged mother. The novel probes the many costs of withholding the truth, and yet it ends on a positive note. Remy discovers his mother seriously ill in hospital, develops a relationship with her, and learns the secret of his older brother, who was born physically and mentally disabled after the cord twisted around his neck before birth. That brother had been placed in a Catholic institution for such children, most of whom were orphans — placed there by Remy’s father, against the wishes of his mother. Under the arrangement his parents then made, Remy was allowed to adore his father and fear his mother without ever knowing their secret. By the time he discovers the truth, his brother has died, along with three other young boys, in a fire at the institution.

If the novel has a message for the reader, it is the importance of truth-telling, even when the truth seems to hold all kinds of risk. But the novel is about so much more: about family, about friendship, about the similarities and differences between India and America, and particularly between Bombay and the Midwest. Although the prose stumbles at times and can feel a little heavy-handed, we all agreed that the book is well written, and each of us had favorite passages that we shared in discussion.