In a mostly glowing 1989 review of Jasmine, New York Times reviewer Michael Gorra exresses one of the few flaws he finds in the novel: "Jasmine is so tightly made one wants to read it in a sitting. Yet, paradoxically, that's also the novel's chief weakness. Its other characters, however vivid, remain too firmly subordinated to Jasmine. Their stories matter only insofar as they affect hers, in a way that not only suggests the novel's origins as a short story, but that troubles me precisely because those characters are so vivid." Gorra prefaces his criticism by citing Frank O'Connor's comparison of short stories to novels, where he says that "while the novel deals with the structure of society, the short story tends to concentrate on what he calls 'the lonely voice,' on 'outlawed figures wandering about' on that society's fringes."
The novel Jasmine grew from a short story by the same name from Mukherjee's 1988 collection, The Middlemen and Other Stories. While the story is considerably shorter than the novel, and the perspective is changed, the protagonist's origins are Trinidad rather than Punjab—and her passage to America is considerably different from Jasmine's in the novel both in its motivation and in the level of danger and trauma the respective protagonists face—there are clear parallels between the two works, and elucidating those parallels may help us understand more about where the "center" of the novel lies.
The Jasmine of the short story is quite different from the Jasmine of the novel. Her motivation for coming to the United States is taken for granted—as in, who wouldn't want to come to the United States if the opportunity arose? That's exactly what the United States represents in the short story, the amorphous concept of opportunity. The narrator describes the scene when Jasmine's co-workers in Trinidad learn she's leaving for the United States: "The girls she’d worked with at the bank in Port-of-Spain had gone green as bananas when she’d walked in with her ticket on Air Canada. Trinidad was too tiny. That was the trouble. Trinidad was an island stuck in the middle of nowhere. What kind of place was that for a girl with ambition?" (128). In the novel, by contrast, Jasmine isn't even sure she wants to go to the United States. It's Prakash who has the real desire; and when she finally does decide to go, it's to honor Prakash. She plans to kill herself after she burns his suit on the Florida campus. Needless to say, given more space in the novel form, Jasmine's motivations, background, and experiences can be more complex.
Another difference that allows readers a more in-depth view of Jasmine's motivations in the novel is that the novel is in the first-person perspective, whereas the short story remains in the third-person, moderately close to Jasmine's mind but still clearly distinguished from it. The distance between Jasmine and the narrator in the short story might leave the reader with an impression that the story is trying to make a more general statement about a young woman's experience of immigrating to the United States, taking a caretaker job, and finding herself in the middle of a marriage of two people whose worlds are quite different from her own.
Where the story becomes most obviously the jumping-off point for the novel is where, in the short story, Jasmine is hired to work as a caregiver for a university family in Ann Arbor. The husband, Bill Moffitt, works as a molecular biologist and professor at the University of Michigan, and his wife, Lara Hatch-Moffitt, is a performance artist. Their daughter's name is Muffin. This dynamic is almost identical to the Hayes' in Jasmine the novel. Taylor is a physicist rather than a biologist, Wylie is a publisher rather than a performance artist, but it remains a scientist/humanist relationship. Making Taylor a physicist in the novel bolsters his character's ability to relate to its heavily astral figurative world. The fact that Wylie is a publisher rather than a performance artist allows her to engage with and commoditize the categories of trauma that Jasmine deals with first hand in the form of publishing scandalous memoirs and celebrity interviews. You can see that the hyphenated last name, which appears as Kate Gordon-Feldstein in the novel, is something that Mukherjee wanted to keep as a marker of a progressive, artistic woman in America.
However, Bill is quite different from Taylor in the way that his interest in Jasmine manifests. The short story ends during their first intimate encounter. Lara is on the road performing, and Bill makes an advance after Muffin goes to sleep. It's just after Christmastime (the materialism of which was another focal hallmark of American culture in the novel). But the sexual nature of their attraction is far more important in the short story than in the novel. In fact, by the time Taylor comes to Iowa to take Jasmine with him to California, it's unclear and unlikely even that they have, at that point, had sex. The novel is far more interested in Jasmine's emotional and intellectual attraction to Taylor and the dichotomy of obligation and freedom Jasmine faces when it comes to deciding whether to stay with Bud or start a new life with Taylor.
