Unlike her first explosive novel, “Honor,” which begins powerfully, in her new novel, “The Museum of Failures” author Thrity Umrigar builds our connection with the characters slowly and carefully. We meet Remy as he travels to his native India to see about adopting a baby. He arrives in Mumbai, which he still calls by the name he used in his childhood, Bombay, and is immediately drawn in and made at home by his childhood best friend Jango and his wife, Shenaz.

One of the things that Umrigar does beautifully is to immerse us in the sights, the sounds, the smells, and even the tastes of India. We feel the hot sun burning our backs, we taste the coconut water fresh from the fruit, we can visualize the crowded streets and backed-up traffic as well as the gray Arabian Sea on the horizon. So when Remy enters his mother’s apartment, he immediately notices the signs of neglect in the expansive, expensive apartment: cracked tiles, peeling paint, a water-damaged ceiling. He compares this to the immaculate apartment in the same building that is inhabited by his cousin and his wife, who live there rent-free because they agreed to take care of Remy’s mother, Shirin. However when he visits them, they inform him that Shirin is in the hospital. She stopped talking and eating.

Umrigar is a master at making time flow back and forth, and the manner in which she takes us back in time to understand Remy’s relationship with his parents seems almost effortless. But if you examine how she weaves in the back and forth, it’s almost magical how it just works with no confusion, just clarity about what happened in the past and how it relates to the present. Or, as we discover, seeming clarity about the past which we learn is misleading.

While the purpose of Remy’s trip is to see about adopting a baby, he has been looking forward to seeing his mother with mixed emotions. Through Remy’s third person narrative we see that he, “braced himself for the inevitability of his mother’s scathing comments, the critical eyes looking him over and ready to find fault.” Remy doesn’t like his mother, and when we read about the abuse he suffered at her hands both physically and emotionally, we completely understand.

Remy meets with the young college student, Shenaz’s niece, she appears to have changed her mind. Remy is disappointed, but goes to the hospital to visit his mother and finds her greatly changed from the last time he saw her, three years ago. She has pneumonia and has trouble breathing, she is uncommunicative, she won’t eat. Perhaps because of her inability to talk, she is unable to say anything negative to Remy, so as he tries to get her to eat and drink, he begins to feel love toward his mother. He remembers small actions that showed that his mother did love him, instead of the other memories that would indicate otherwise.

In his mother’s apartment, he finds a cryptic letter from his father, obviously written shortly before his father’s death three years before. His mother refuses to explain what the letter means. While looking for documents, he finds in a prayer book a photo of a young boy labeled Cyloo, who his mother had called out for when she was her sickest. He brings the photo to his mother and she reveals a long-held family secret. It’s this secret that changes Remy, and the two women who were close to his father: his mother and Dina, his father’s good friend and lawyer.

This book is Umrigar showing the difficulty of leaving ones culture and going to a new country, to live a different kind of life. She, like the fictional Remy, left Bombay and lives in Ohio. One her website she explains, “Like me, Remy is a Parsi, a member of a tiny ethnic and religious minority in India, practitioners of the ancient faith of Zoroastrianism.  Like me, he is not particularly religious.  But when events conspire to keep Remy in Bombay, he feels a renewed appreciation for this small, tolerant, fun-loving and warm-hearted community in which he was raised. Hovering over that appreciation is the existential dread of knowing that the Parsis of India are on the verge of extinction and may disappear within a generation or two.”

We see that Remy’s father was kind and generous. He helped others whenever he could. But as we learn, outward appearances can be misleading. While Remy all but worshipped his father and wanted to emulate him in every respect, what he learns about his mother turns everything he thought for his whole life upside down. He compares India to the titular place, the Museum of Failures, a real place in Sweden that closed. Everything that goes wrong, every way in which Mumbai disappoints, becomes part of the Museum of Failures.

But what Remy does with what he’s learned, and how he deals with the unexpected twists in what he expected would happen and what actually happens, is where we see that Remy is made of sterner material than we were first led to believe. At the beginning, he could not bring himself to chide the cousins who were to care for his mother but rather neglected her, didn’t make sure she ate, and didn’t pay her bills. By the end, we see a Remy who has come to understand his childhood, his mother, and how no one—not his father nor his mother—was perfect. Each did the best they could in circumstances that were extremely trying. And each, in their own way, failed not only themselves but those around them.

We come away with a determination to be less judgmental, because none of us know exactly what others are going through and what the motivations are for their actions. And we see Remy roll with the punches, and somehow remain hopeful about the future. “The Museum of Failures” is Unrigar’s way of sharing the mixed emotions those who leave their birthplace have when they return to the sights, sounds, and people of their childhood. She shares the beauty, as well as the seamier side, of India. Because as she points out, people and places are not perfect. We all have our secrets, our hidden faults, as well as our wonderful parts.

Please note: This review is based on the advance reader’s copy provided by Algonquin Books, the publisher, for review purposes.