Jhumpa Lahiri’s much-awaited collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, hits bookshelves this week. As she makes her way around the US on an eight-city tour (she has a sold-out reading at Symphony Space tonight), gushing reviews have started pouring in. 
The Village Voice’s Lenora Todaro compares Lahiri to a “young Alice Munro” and praises the emotional wisdom of these stories. [link]
Eight long short stories (three of which were previously published in the New Yorker) make up this striking collection whose title was inspired by a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same wornout soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”
The Christian Science Monitor [link] says of Unaccustomed Earth: “Returning to themes she explored in her first novel, “The Namesake,” Pulitzer-Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri details with quiet precision the divide between American-born children and their Bengali parents in her new short-story collection.”
I disagree. I don’t think this book is so much about the divide between generations as it is about the lives of the second-generation, the lives of the children of immigrants. The parents here play a secondary role – they are lenses through which children grow to understand themselves better.
Lisa Fugard of the Los Angeles Times gets it when she writes [link], “In her latest work, “Unaccustomed Earth,” a powerful collection of short stories, those children have left home and are starting families of their own, as they struggle both with tangled filial relationships and the demands of parenthood. The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations.”
In New York magazine’s profile of Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Confidence Artist: Jhumpa Lahiri Isn’t Afraid to Provoke Tears” [link], Boris Kachka writes:
Unaccustomed Earth is, once again, about upwardly mobile South Asians from New England, and so is the novel she’s working on. “ ’Is that all you’ve got in there?’ I get asked the question all the time,” says Lahiri. “It baffles me. Does John Updike get asked this question? Does Alice Munro? It’s the ethnic thing, that’s what it is. And my answer is always, yes, I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and there’s nothing more important than that.”
Yes, Lahiri’s latest stories are once again about Bengali Americans, many of them set in Cambridge and London (where she was born), but keep going and it’s obvious that she has gone further and deeper, taken a turn in another direction, choosing to write about the experiences of second-generation Indian-Americans, about their fraught relationships with their parents, about multi-racial marriages, and at the end of it all, the human condition. (Elsewhere in Unaccustomed Earth, she takes us to Italy, Thailand, London, but what she does keep coming back to is Mass., Cambridge.)
The title story “Unaccustomed Earth” is (in the incredible Lahiri third person voice, as so many of the pieces in this collection are) about the fragile relationship between a 30-something daughter and her widow father. She is expecting, the mother of a young son, and married to a non-Indian. Her father’s first visit to her new home in Seattle is fraught with unspoken tension — her fear that he’ll expect her to invite him to move in with her family and his wish not to have her know about his “girlfriend.” (It was refreshing to me that this story was set in Seattle because it gave me a window into Lahiri’s amazing ability to create a sense of place.)
“Hell-Heaven” is written from the 1st person perspective. A daughter reminisces about her mother’s relationship with Pranab kaku, the “adopted uncle” who had such an important role in her childhood–and realizes as an adult that her mother was actually in love with him. This is at its core a story about the broken hearts of a mother and daughter; about how as adults we see situations in a new light because of our own experiences.
The protagonist of “A Choice of Accomodations” is Amit, a 40’ish year old husband and father who is on a weekend getaway with his wife Megan. They are attending the wedding of one of his high school and college friends (and crush) on the campus of his prestigious prep school in Massachusetts. This is a beautiful story about the unspoken expectations of a relationship, of marriage — and by placing Amit in a setting that so rooted in “a piece of his past that had nothing to do with the life he and Megan shared,” Lahiri explores the maze and intricacies of marriage, themes of companionship and aloneness, habits, and unspoken expectations.
“Only Goodness” is about Sudha, a sister who carries the guilt of her brother’s alcoholism and is forced to come to terms with it. Like so many of Lahiri’s characters, she too carries a burden, a grief, a secret … a heaviness that touches me in a deep place as a reader.
Maybe the biggest departure from the Jhumpa that we know is “Nobody’s Business” where the protagonist is Paul, a white graduate student who is in love with his Indian-American housemate Sang (Sangeeta). He carries a secret about her troubled relationship and struggles to figure out whether to say or do something about it or to stay silent.
And, finally, there’s the trilogy “Hema and Kaushik,” where Lahiri experiments with perspective in a way that blew me over. The characters are tied to each other loosely because their families are friends and they lived under the same roof for a few months as teenagers. We are taken into each of their worlds, the loss of Kaushik’s mother, his shock at finding that his mother has remarried, his complicated relationship with his new step sisters … Then life brings them together again years later in Rome. Written in a take on the first and second-person (you), the characters take turns addressing each other in parts I (Hema in “Once in a Lifetime” and II (Kaushik in “Year’s End”), then Jhumpa returning to the third person for most of Part III (“Going Ashore”), but returning to Hema’s voice as she once again talks to Kaushik.
On NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Maureen Corrigan says, “To read Lahiri’s short story collection and to only take away an experience of cultural tourism would be akin to reading Dante only to retain how medieval Italians slurp their spaghetti. Lahiri’s fiction delves deep into the universal theme of isolation.” She defines the collection as “tales of immigration but also takes its rightful place with tales of modernism.”
Adele Waldman in The New Republic [link] writes, “Jhumpa Lahiri’s books are more about the coastal elite experience than they are about the Indian-American one. … Her tales of marriage, divorce, becoming a parent, and grappling with the death of adult parents are the opposite of exotic; her fiction winds up painting a very intelligent portrait of upper middle class life. They aren’t immigrant stories, not in a traditional sense…”
Maybe that is true on one level, but I don’t think any Indian-American who picks up this book can say that Lahiri’s stories do not reflect nuances of our existence as children of immigrants, as cultural minorities, as the oft-represented “other”; nuances that we rarely encounter in the books that make their way into our hands. I’d venture to say that these are immigrant stories too – stories of a new America where culture and race and tradition collide in unexpected ways and where, at the end of it, we are left with a better understanding of both sides of a story and of the (this is cliche, I know, but I can’t think of any other way to say it), the universal human condition. I think that’s what makes Lahiri’s work genius – she gets at this without going cliche on us.
One final note: And yet, Bengali-American is the defining characteristic of this book for the publishers, it seems. I’m always fascinated by the labeling of books, the copyright page, where this book is categorized as: 1. Bengali Americans-Fiction 2. Bengali (South Asian people)-United States-Fiction … Whereas Lahiri’s first collection, Interpreter of Maladies is defined as: 1. East Indian Americans-Social life and customs-Fiction.
92 · Floridian said
Floridian! Surely somebody as classy as you realizes that a shared appreciation of Bogart and Eliot over cognac and canapes trumps a divergence in opinions about writing that reeks faintly of the dolorous word soup that used to pass for short fiction in the pages of Femina and Women’s Era?
You need to watch more Suneel Darshan 🙂
Hats off to you. Doesn’t mean I want to read about water tables over and over 🙂
94 · Manish Vij said
Chunky Poon-de perhaps?
#101 Rahul: …”writing that reeks faintly of the dolorous word soup that used to pass for short fiction in the pages of Femina and Women’s Era?”
That would be more applicable to Arundhati Roy, whose thesaurus-swallowed, imagery-reeking, utterly laughable “words like syrupy little rossogullas” prose is usually associated with bright eyed and bushy tailed first-year lit students trying to win the professor’s approval. Lahiri? She has a much lighter touch than that.
That said, I am still trying to make up my mind about Lahiri. The old literary critic in me – the noble calling I was aspiring to before circumstances forced me to succumb to a lifelong chase of filthy lucre – is a little apprehensive that “The Namesake” may have tainted me forever for any honest appraisal of Lahiri. Most literary critics are capable of keeping their private lives out of the task at hand, but Mr. Ganguly rang such a loud and alarming bell in the mind of this Ganguly dead ringer that I might have made a critic’s worst mistake – personally identifying with a character, and to compound the error, liking the author’s other works just for that reason.
But let me make an attempt at objectivity about my second most favorite Bengali female.
Cultural rootedness is needed to give fiction a sense of legitimacy – Fellini with small town Italians, Joyce with Dublin, Twain with the Mississippi River’s lovable though fallible characters, even Grisham with his Delta. Having found her Bengalis-in-America milieu, she then proceeds to draw characters and story lines that could just as easily be about other immigrants living in other parts of the world.
When I mingle with immigrants from Cuba, Latin America and Israel, three very common immigrant groups in South Florida, and when I used to meet Eastern European immigrants during my Chicago days, I am reminded of how “desi” and how parallel to ours their reactions and life experiences are. Even their private ethnic jokes about their FOB’s and “_____” Standard Time (fill in your nationality) are the same.
Therefore, Lahiri’s diasporic world is not as cloistered as one may think. She may be giving us a peek at the hundreds of millions of people who build their lives in “other” lands.
A greater quality of Lahiri’s is that she has an unusually light touch with not just language but, more importantly, with characters, stories and emotions. While the same quality occasionally leaves the reader unsatisfied or unconvinced – as in the reductionist characterization of Gogol’s desi wife or the self-absorbed Amreeki parents of his gori girlfriend – her light touch also creates some very haunting tales, as in the theme story of the book, Interpreter of Maladies. What exactly was it that happened between the poor Indian guide, Mr. Kapasi, and the second-generation Indian woman visiting from the US, Mrs. Das? “What the h*ll was that,” one is left wondering. “No one but Mr. Kapasi noticed” that the piece of paper with his address, so carefully given to Mrs. Das, flutters away in the wind as Mrs. Das nonchalantly opens her bag to find a hairbrush. Good stuff!
It reminded me of an old Hindi film, “Teesri Kasam,” with the poor peasant, played by Raj Kapoor, becoming somewhat enamored of the visiting dancer, played by Waheeda Rahman, and better yet, remaining to the end a little confused about what exactly he felt. Coincidentally, this emotionally open-ended, Lahiri-like story was written by another very “milieu dedicated” writer, Fanishwar Nath Renu. The term “aanchalik”, literally meaning “regional,” is attributed to Hindi writers who steadfastly stick to a milieu.
Ultimately, only time would tell how important a writer Lahiri is. Writers are given a permanent spot in a literary tradition usually by the generation after them. By that time, the fad factor has played out, the past has been understood and defined, and the great ones of their time duly annointed. (T.S. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism.”)
My impression is that Lahiri will find a permanent place, not so much for her diasporic sensibility, which is fast becoming a commodity in Indo-English literature, but for her great ability to leave extremely plausible human emotions open ended and, therefore, forever haunting, in all her stories. Please read the last few sentences of “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” another story in the Interpreter collection. Here is a link.
http://www.esubjects.com/curric/general/multiculturalism/unit_three/pdf/Interpreter_of_Maladies.pdf
I intend to read Unaccustomed Earth soon. Thank you for alerting me to that, and thanks a million, SM, for not restricting comments to 100 words or less.
That’s a very sympathetic take by Floridian and he does the honorable thing by confessing his identification with Ganguly which colors his critical view point.
I am more with Manish on this one. Whether or not a great writer only writes well about the world he or she knows, can be argued either way. Authors have dazzled us with their deep understanding of a narrow world and localized introspection as well as their expansive flights of fancy. A light touch can occasionally be too light.
I will copy here part of what I wrote in my comment on the review by my co-blogger Sujatha on our blog.
Whatever your opinions about Jhumpa’s literary merits are, she is surely making the headlines. She is the front cover of NYT Sunday book review and Unaccustomed Earth is #2 in amazon. Way to go.
Jhumpa Lahiri has come quite a way from Interpreter of Maladies. That was well written but struck me as perfected to the point of sterility. The Namesake was a pleasant surprise – always a pleasure when a writer has grown. It would be great if the blurb writers would move on too; they still don’t distinguish much between the Exotic Indian (mango) pulp and any other kind. I’ll reserve judgment on Unaccustomed Earth until I read it – the short story is the most difficult medium of them all and her first attempt was, for me, not a book worth keeping.
I idly wonder what direction Arundhati Roy’s growth would have taken if she hadn’t bowed out of fiction in a hurry.
I don’t know. To me, her characters, with their vague feelings of discontent and unarticulated misgivings about life choices, usually described in passionless prose, almost seem apathetic. And if they themselves don’t care, why should I?
That said, I tore through the Namesake because I identified with it, like you did. I read it when I was in a particularly angsty phase, and I really identified with some details and aspects of Gogol’s life. But it was in spite of her writing, which annoyed me to no end, and made me feel slightly mortified at my own eagerness to finish the book.
Her overwrought prose and selective takes on global history make me wonder if she ever bowed out.
Jhumpa knows how to write, no doubts about that. It si her subject matter that is getting a tad bit tired now. Melancholy second generation Indians Can not be the only thing she knows, no ?
But I suppose one writes what sells…I would too, if that is what the publisher and the readers were looking for.
Is that like sambar wonder?
109 · Neerja said
A book is not just about technical prowess. Sure Lahiri can write, but is she a writer? She may be getting there, is as far as I will go.
And I seriously doubt The Grapes of Wrath or Hotel du Lac or Golden Gate (to name a mere three) were written with one eye on marketing. There is a place for the books that are written for a “target audience” and that’s fine. I read a lot of them myself. The problem with the the well-marketed Indian writers is that both media and bookstores tend to abdicate all sense of proportion, dispensing with the discrimination between genres, ability and place-in-the-pantheon that is usually brought to bear.
I feel strongly on the subject: http://shilo70.blogspot.com/2006/12/indian-novel.html
110 · Manju said
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Ha ha ha I only just got it! Ha ha ha ha
111 · Gargoyle:
You just hit upon an entirely new topic and a highly relevant one for this thread.
As a trained marketing professional and a businessman who also happens to like literature and the arts in general, I detect heavy marketing orientation in the works of most authors today. I am not referring to authors hitting the talk show circuit to promote their books or using “controversial” but completely gratuitous ploys in writing to sell books, such as giving the four prostitutes the same names as the Prophet’s wives (Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses earned him a lot of money and global recognition, thanks to the fatwa.).
What I consider undue marketing influence in literature is an author finding a successful formula and, at the direction of the publisher and agent, repeating it to death because the author must grow into a brand and find a niche in order to survive in today’s marketplace. And branding, by definition, is a process that is just the opposite of creativity. (That is not to say that the act of branding does not require creativity. I have to believe that.)
If each year Mercedes cars changed their renowned quality, features, shapes and even the tri-star just in order to attract different demographic segments, the brand will eventually get diluted into oblivion. Consistency, repetition, focus, reductionism, a concise value proposition are the hallmarks of branding. Unbridled experimentation, novelty, broad thinking, flights of fancy, new thoughts and ideas – these are, or should be, the hallmarks of the arts.
One could say that to some extent artists have always ended up with their unique branding traits. A Dali is instantly identifiable as a Dali if you have seen a few of his paintings. Almost every Thomas Hardy novel reads like it is a part of a family of novels almost like the NOW CD’s I see all over the house. ee cummings’s poetry has its own formula. Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie school of architecture puts the same stamp on a structure, be it a house or a public building.
Is it marketing or a legitimate case of artists following their inner voice? I think the latter.
Marketing is when the market tells the artist what to do. That is becoming a necessity in today’s world, where markets are highly fragmented, leaving nichemanship the do-or-die option, information and creative channels too numerous, the sheer volume of books and movies produced mind boggling.
Yet, it is possible to cater to a target audience and still attain greatness. Shakespeare wrote plays simply to put the commoners’ butts into seats at the Globe. He didn’t do too badly for himself.
108 Rahul:
I am glad you homed in on the same stuff that I find great about her – vague feelings, unarticulated whatever but not always misgivings. That’s what so great about literature. Two people can recognize the same elements in an author but react quite differently.
Oh well, we’ll always have Eliot. (Did you know “Play it again, Sam” was not a dialog ever used in the movie?)
Floridian,
I’m not talking about her subject matter. What she writes about is not as important as how.
And there lies the problem! The phenomenon of reviewing/judging a book by it’s subject matter more the quality of the writing/thought/treatment is a scourge that affects every release from a “foreign” community (from Irish to South African to Afghani to Indian).
I guess for me Lahiri does not have the quality that convinces me that it’s the inner voice.
114 · Floridian said
The ‘again’ is not in the movie, Floridian; Minkey Chief had it right, back here. Or are you talking about something else altogether?
Unaccustomed Earth is certainly a brilliant read, and Jhumpa Lahiri, choses once again to handle the topics that she is so comfortable with!!! Certainly an emotional roller coaster, with brilliantly rendered sentences, bringing out a wide range of emotions!!!
Hmm, even if the movie had the line “Play it again, Sam” it wouldn’t be a dialogue unless it went:
Ilsa: Play it. Sam: Again? Ilsa: Sammm.
I think Jhumpa is probably most appreciated by those who prefer emotional diversity to a diversity of setting. You have to be able to relate to the emotional situations she handles instead of looking for What Her Stories Say About the Indian Immigrant Experience, or else yes, you could find the repetitive themes boring.
i read this SM post before i read the book, and at the time i didn’t agree with criticism that her writing about bengalis in new england was a bad thing. i’ve read over half of the book (now in the midst of the Hema and Kaushik story) and i am really sick of this author! although i relish all things bengali, her characters ARE tired and whiney. every single story features an indian kid who NEEDS to turn away from his/her indian roots to find happiness in a non-indian. even in the story where an indian character dates a non-whitie, the boyfriend ends up being a controlling jerk and the good guy remains to be the white guy. i know interracial marriages are common these days, but is that really all she can write about? i can forgive her for sticking to a couple of themes she knows well (bengali, immigrant, new england, elite and educated, inter-racial couples) but she needs to spice it up a little rather than running down the checklist for every story she writes.
im guessing and hoping this last story ends a little differently! but of course, so far an indian kid is dating a white chick. vomit i really want to know what desi guy broke lahiri’s heart so bad!
While there is no question about Ms Lahiri’s talent as a writer, I find the underlying sense of inferiority that seems to exist in most of her Indian and Indian-American characters rather exhausting.. while this initially evokes sympathy in the reader, it is soon replaced by apathy, and later irritation. I find missing in her stories, the sheer pride that a lot of newer Indian immigrants like me, and lot of my peers take, in having beaten the odds, and creating fulfilling lives in a foreign land. While she may be reflecting her own experiences in this country, on her characters, as a member of a minority community in a foreign land, I resent being painted on with the same broad brush. More of these people seem to spend a lot of their lives in twilight, as it were.. Sad that there dont seem to be other talented Indian American writers who can write about the other facets of the Indian community’s experience here.
I didnt like Unaccustomed Earth.
I feel as if its the same set of characters with different names struggling to fit into America or whichever the foreign land is.
Is it just me or has anyone noticed how bland these set of stories are in comparison to her previous collection, “Interpretor of Maladies”. The only one story that kind of made sense in the whole collection was Hell-Heaven. It had a good plot and a knockout finish.
I hope Jhumpa’s next book is better than this.
“It’s very difficult to achieve greatness in the short story format “
I have one word for you- ‘Salinger’ !
‘Nine Stories’ is pretty darn closest to perfection in writing (if there were such a thing as that)
‘For Esme with Love and Squalor’ enough is to render the collection its stature of greatness. Then there are the usualy suspects- Chekov, Tolstoy….
Borges is always inventive and fun. I like Kafka’s novellas better
Coming back to ‘Unaccustomed Earth’:-
The BEST story for me was ‘Hell- Heaven’- one of the shortest but what an reminisce of a secret, unspoken, simmering, unrequited romance. The second favorite was ‘Year’s End’- the middle instalment in the Hema- Kaushik trilogy- it’s actually three rather independent stories loosely put together to form a long short story. The titular story is amazing as well. I was indifferent towards ‘Only Goodness’ and ‘Choice of Accomodations’. I liked ‘Nobody’s Business’ the least ‘Going Ashore’- especially the way it ends, wraps up the book really well
I’d rate this higher than Interpreter where I think apart from ‘A Temporary Matter’ (outstanding) and the titular story, none of the material approached greatness
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