An American subculture in a tme of distress in current New Yorker story

The New Yorker continues its streak of excellent stories, many of them by writers not widely known to the reading public, such is Sadia Shepard, with a fine story, Foreign-Returned, in the current issue (as noted in other posts - this may reflect a change in short fiction publication strategy at the NYer, with more interest in true short stories and less in novel excerpts, particularly from famous writers, many of which serve primarily as promotional announcements for the book publisher). Shepard's story is about a 30ish Pakistani couple living in Stamford where the husband works in a dull job at a major bank, with a dim future and the likelihood of layoffs, while the wife hopes is at-home and hoping to get pregnant - in other words, a sad, somewhat isolated couple, though they do have ties to a set of older and more prosperous Pakistanis, much more settled into an American life. Husband (Hassan) it turns out has to share a tight workspace w/ a younger Pakistani-American woman whom the bank has just hired; she's far more ambitious (and intelligent), socially abrasive, American born and raised but, unlike Hassan, strictly devout in her religious practices and politically committed. The story involves the tensions among these three, each w/ his or her own set of issues, and a few powerful scenes on the domestic front (plus one chilling account by the young woman of hostility she encountered while campaigning for Democrats). Shepard gives us a confident, self-assured, and well-delineated vision of an American subculture in a time of great personal and political distress, w/out being in the least polemical or doctrinaire. The story also has a bit of a kick at the end, with a surprising turn of events and a suitable ambiguity - leaving us feeling that not the author but the world is a bit out of control. My only quibble is that I would have cut the long passage in which the young woman tells Hassan about her difficult family background; that felt a bit forced, and the story would have been slightly better had her life been a little more mysterious, at least to us. 



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