according to pulitzer prize winner jhumpa lahiri, narayan's short stories have the same captivating feeling as his novels, with most of them less than ten pages long, and taking about as many minutes to read. she adds that between the title sentence and the end, narayan provides the reader something novelists struggle to achieve in hundreds more pages: a complete insight to the lives of his characters. these characteristics and abilities led lahiri to classify him as belonging to the pantheon of short-story geniuses that include o. henry, frank o'connor and flannery o'connor. lahiri also compares him to guy de maupassant for their ability to compress the narrative without losing the story, and the common themes of middle-class life written with an unyielding and unpitying vision.