When a writer of serious purpose chooses to make imaginative use of genre writing—the historical romance, the science fiction novel, the mystery story—the reader feels compelled to ask: why? What is going to get said here, in this way, that would not otherwise have gotten said? How is this piece of artifice integral to the story that is actually being told? What internal urgency does the formal restriction serve? These are not rhetorical questions. The reader really wants an answer.

Bharati Mukherjee is the Calcutta-born author of seven novels and collections of essays. The situation in the novels, almost always, is that of the undocumented Indian immigrant in America. Mukherjee is one of the writers who has helped put the word "illegals" on the map of American literature. Because of her stories I have an ineradicable image in my head: that of an army of people in Queens living out their lives "in a room with tightly drawn curtains watching TV till [they're] glassy-eyed, hiding at every unexpected sound."

The narrating voice in these novels and stories is invariably intelligent, detached, savvy, benumbed. Humiliation is its middle name, humiliation permanent and historic, begun in India and only continued on in America; the deep buried-alive humiliation of people who have been "illegal" from the day they were born. In these stories Mukherjee is not psychologically inclined, but the mass of detail with which the characters present themselves is alive to the touch: painful in its authority, persuasive in its concreteness. The situation feels inevitable, and that often makes the narrator seem unavoidable.

The Holder of the World, Mukherjee's new novel, is a historical romance framed in a science fiction staple (time-travel), and it purports, in a surprise ending, to be relating the "true" history of a famous character in American literature. Let me summarize as best I can.

Beigh Masters, a thirty-year-old woman descended from the Puritans, lives in Cambridge (Mass.) with Venn Iyer, an Indian computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an asset investigator (that is, a tracer of lost or hidden possessions); he "animates" information. Together, they are about to penetrate time. At his computer, Venn is trying to recreate a day in the past so perfectly that someone who is now alive will be able to step into it, if only for a few seconds. Beigh, meanwhile, has in the course of her investigations stumbled on the record of a distant relative. Hannah Easton, a woman born three hundred years ago in New England. Hannah survived a famous Indian massacre (in which her mother presumably perished), was then adopted and raised in Salem, married an Englishman, went to India with him, and in time became the mistress of a Raja. In 1700, Beigh concludes, Hannah Easton returned to Salem, pregnant with the Raja's baby, to become … Hester Prynne.

Venn and Beigh are both absorbed to the point of obsession by their twin projects: his to amass as much information as possible on his chosen day, hers to discover all there is to know about Hannah. The idea, for both of them, is that "with sufficient passion and intelligence, we can deconstruct the barriers of time and geography." And indeed: when Venn's technology is perfected Beigh is transported for a few seconds (in "virtual reality") back into Hannah's last violent days in India, where she (Beigh) solves a minor mystery that has been hanging down from the story like a loose end.

The Hannah Easton whom Beigh is investigating(ninety percent of the novel is Beigh's report on Hannah's imagined experience) is a woman who supposedly breaks the mold of Puritan repression. She has a sensual nature, inherited from her mother who apparently faked her own death to run off with an Indian lover. In the course of her life in India, as that nature is gradually revealed to her, Hannah discovers that she has the courage to act. What this finally comes down to is an extravagant passion for the Raja: her own hot-blooded Indian.

The background to Hannah's self-discovery is her life with Gabriel. Legge, the English husband who works for the plundering East India Company. Gabriel is intelligent, civil, ruthless. Hannah would have been happy to have had a passion for her own husband. The problem was that Gabriel, too, needed his hot-blooded Indian.

And so, of course, does Beigh Presumably this three-ring circus has been put into motion so that Beigh and Venn, a pair of abstract moderns, will become "interactive" with the (historically) buried stirrings of their own blood. Yes? No? It pains me to say this, but your guess is as good as mine. There is so much plot here and so little exploration of inner life that Beigh and Venn themselves remain shadowy: puppeteers jerking the strings of standup Figures dancing around on a makeshift stage while they luck behind the curtain. As for Hannah, she seems a highly arbitrary explanation for one of the most mysterious figures in American literature. She might just as easily have turned out to be the governess in Anna and the King of Siam as Hester Prynne.

Reading this novel I found myself thinking of Wide Sargasso Sea. That book also operates inside a piece of literary artifice; it, too, makes central use of the repressed English in the overheated tropics; and it, as well, takes as its subject the emotional accounting for a Fictional character. But in Wide Sargasso Sea every sentence is penetrated with an innerliness of thought and feeling that makes the narrator seem inevitable, the story unavoidable. Jean Rhys once wrote that she had read Jane Eyre and thought to herself, "She [Bronte] doesn't know that woman. I know her." From the first sentence of Rhys's novel the reader accepts without equivocation the writer's need to work from inside the character of Mrs. Rochester. Reimagining Bertha was vital to the project; there was no other way for Rhys to say what she had to say.

The key words here are "inevitable" and "unavoidable." Need justifies the artifice. When a writer decides to enter the inner life of a fictional character created in another time and place the reader must be persuaded that the character is, for this writer, revelatory: psychologically compelling; necessary to the working out of some elusive but haunting insight. This sense of urgency is missing from The Holder of the World. It is hard to see what Mukherjee is really getting at. The boisterous Hannah does in no way suggest the brooding Hester Prynne, and what Mukherjee has to say about repressed Westerners and sensual Indians is painfully familiar, not at all passionate or clarifying. Inside the complicated apparatus of science-meta-fiction Mukherjee is, if anything, even less psychologically persuasive than in her tales of undocumented Indians.

This novel feels as though it was put in place by the requirements of literary fashion. When that happens the reader is being cheated. Mukherjee owes us one.