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 The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations.”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.
To those asking about how these books compare to the real ABD experience: I’m a 1.5-gen Indian (essentially an ABD with an Indian passport until college) and I really didn’t feel that most of these stories that I’ve read describe the experiences of my family or friends at all. They tend to focus on what’s lost by leaving India, instead of what’s potentially gained by moving to “the land of opportunities”. There will always be struggles when moving to a new country–my parents still struggle to integrate in some aspects of western culture, though we’ve been here for nearly 25 years. (I went abroad for a couple of years, too–not to India–but I definitely understand the plight of the immigrant far better now.) But though I regret only having marginal ties to and knowledge of India, I feel like being here has opened up many opportunities and possibilities for us that may not have been as readily available if we hadn’t come here.
And okay, Lahiri did write “The Third and Final Continent” in Interpreter of Maladies, which I found really uplifting and moving. I haven’t seen another story like it, though.
It doesn’t really bother me that her themes might be narrow, or that her subjects lead extremely ordinary lives. You can write great books on these topics. But I just don’t like her writing style. It is almost clinical in its descriptions of scenes (one that sticks in my memory is when Gogol and Moushumi are sharing an orange after they make love on their first date at her place – the detailed description of how Moushumi was feeding Gogol wedges of the blood-red something-or-the-other orange did not omit a single detail of the room’s furnishings) and misses out on evoking the more important emotional impact at the expense of details. Now her airless prose might actually be a calculated strategy to magnify the suffocating nature of her protagonists’ lives, but it doesn’t work for me.
my friend recommended ‘listening now’ by anjana appachana, because it (partly) takes place in madras and my family is from there. but i found the book both depressing and unsatisfactorily written.
i wasn’t a big fan of interpreter of maladies, but then i read the short story upon which the namesake was based upon, and it was quite good – the focus being more on the father and his tie to gogol, rather than on the son’s ABD woes. to me, something went wrong when lahiri expanded the short story into the novel, as if she just lost the energy to properly convey emotions beyond that one scenario. i read another one of her short stories in the new yorker’s latest fiction issue, but seeing as how i only liked one out of many in the interpreter, i’ll probably hold off on buying…
for anybody interested – i just saw a 20% off display at b&n…
wtf? ridiculous. i remember reading golden gate a while back and it was both powerful and mostly (exclusively?) about non-desis…and although a suitable boy was mainly about indians, some of the best bits had to do with non-indians.
AK _ welcome back. Been wondering where you had been.
It would be interesting to hear the opinions of men who do not read chick lit.
OK, are those peeved at JH’s narrow scope frustrated by the lack of curiosity , of the new world, exhibited by her protagonists? And do you think if she is to write honestly about these folks that’s what she has to work with?
melbourne – thanks! that thing called work has prevented me from doing the more important things, like post a comment at SM 🙂 good to know i’ve actually been missed
From the article posted in the news tab
Aren’t majority of the Indian-Americans considered to be the wealthiest immigrants in America ? So she caters to her crowd. But with increased globalization and more interconnected world I wonder how would the new generation of less-American more global Indian-Americans be characterized in her books in future.
And am I the only one who feels that the “traditional” Indians being depicted in her books seems very cliched and hardly realistic in many cases ? And as if all Indian-Americans had one hell of an angst ridden childhood/growing up.
In response to several comments: Why does her writing have to reflect all these different aspects about “Indian culture.” It’s self-evident you can’t encapsulate all the nuances and diversity of South Asian culture in one book/story, etc., yet we’re expecting her to be the poster child for Indian culture. She writes what inspires her, which may have nothing to do with the aspects of South Asian culture that several of us experienced, yet her writing and her stories are still moving. Aren’t we helping marginalize South Asian culture by expecting any work by any South Asian to be the ideal representation of what is “South Asian?” Like Beyonce is supposed to represent ALL black people. Right.
And, as I write this: I can’t help but wonder: what would folks be saying here if Jhumpa had written a book in which none of the characters were Indian-American? 🙂
Actually, I’m most eager to read “Nobody’s Business.”
I dread reading Jhumpa Lahiri. I felt like her work should be a mirror of life as I know it – but wasn’t…instead, I found myself drowning after being pulled into a looking glass. I’m both afraid that she’s captured what I know and reflected back perfectly…and that she hasn’t captured it, not at all.
Even though I don’t care for her writing style, it’s what keeps me going back for more.
fyi, for Chicago folks, she will be at a Women and Children First Bookstore event in Andersonville on April 8th. You need a ticket though, so call first to reserve a spot (and a book).
Jhumpa Lahiri is quite the bore. I fell asleep after reading 3-4 pages of one of her short stories. She and Salman Rushdie should not write any type of short story or novel.
I like reading about things I only imagine about so I am going to be honest here.
I think that this book is going to be like some bubble gum Indian story that we all have seen and lived through, but the simple words were replaced with more fancy ones from a thesaurus.
i’m still waiting for arundhati to stop caring about the world for a year and write a novel. anyone else?
Strange and invalid comparisons.
She makes the Updike comparison herself in the NY Mag i/v.
That’s just facile.
That’s snark.
I felt like her ABD characters were flat
Up til now she’s focused on the 1st gen. That’s where she comes alive.
don’t presume to call your preference some objective critique of literary quality.
It’s a critique of repetitiveness.
just say you don’t like her writing.
I liked her story just fine the first time. But I’m not compelled to read it again 🙂
Btw, though she is a competent writer, she is a monotonous public speaker. Her publicist needs to buy her Toastmasters lessons.
what would folks be saying here if Jhumpa had written a book in which none of the characters were Indian-American?
The same as for ‘My Revolutions,’ which is, ‘Gee, I really should read that sometime’ 🙂
It is almost clinical in its descriptions of scenes
It is like the segment in Fight Club where names of IKEA sets annotate the scene.
She and Salman Rushdie should not write any type of short story or novel.
Odd to lump these together. Rushdie is her opposite.
i’m still waiting for arundhati to stop caring about the world for a year and write a novel.
Stop teasing me.
I just want to know did anyone actually finish “A Suitable Boy”?
Can we get a poll here.
I strongly feel that she is an utter sell-out. The only way she’d amount to anything is if she wrote in pure Bengali with a Feather Quill, all the while sat on the floor, and signed her name Nilanjana Sudeshna at the end of it. Jhumpa is her slave name and I’m offended; all Indians are.
UMM, you sellout. Everyone knows real Bongs only write JNU textbooks or Rabindra sangeet.
I’d strongly recommend Kiran Desai! The Inheritance of Loss is a very, very good book, but I also loved the extremely clever and funny Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.
I don’t quite like Anita Desai or, for that matter, Vikram Chandra (IMHO, a very mediocre writer).
Just a snippet for those seeking samples from the story as enticement. The opening of “Nobody’s Business”:
(No, this story is not really about all the blind dates that Sang goes on.)
Funny books: Hullabaloo definitely put a smile on my face, as did No Onions Nor Garlic, by Srividya Natarajan, which I recently picked up in India (I don’t think it’s available here).
When JL first came on the scene, she seemed so exciting: young, great jacket photo, lots of promise, New Yorker exposure, and interesting stories about East Coast Bengalis with all sorts of repressed things going on. Now it’s not quite as fun. The New Yorker stories continue to appear, but the glamour is gone (her stories, anyway, are the antithesis of glamour) and the Bengalis keep on repressing and releasing their emotions (and eating fish). Part of the problem must be the medium. At a certain point, doesn’t she have to move onto The Great Bengali Cambridge Novel? The Namesake doesn’t count — it’s like a long short story in its scope and tone. It’s very difficult to achieve greatness in the short story format — I can think only of Borges and Kafka (in my stubborn opinion).
Actually I myself really liked ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ but somehow I couldn’t connect with ‘The Namesake’. One of the above comments was right: her writing is too clinical. My mother, a DBD, loved ‘The Namesake’. Although I think it’s unfair to expect her to encapsulate the whole ‘Ãmmigrant experience’ into one novel, since everybody has different experiences. I can’t comment on the real life of ABD’s vs. the novel, since I didn’t grow up in the States and my time on this site taught me that there is even quite a difference between ABDs and EBDs(European Born Desis). Hey, maybe I should write a book…;)
Dubliners by Joyce is one of my favorite collections of short stories. The short story is a great place to showcase the disciplined, muscular, spare style of writing that I most appreciate.
Thanks for pointing that out, Manish. It also just struck me that if she were a true Bong, she would have spat on that Pulitzer Prize Medal and thrown it back at the Columbia University Conceiterati; since when does a real Bong need validation from the West? Everyone knows that the Howrah Bridge was built without using a single nut or bolt. But, how many of us are privy to the riveting bit of information that all that metal came from disdainfully melting western accolades?
After all this time on SM, I have to say that I do heart Americanese, but, why do I get the feeling that Jhumpaji didn’t mean it like that?
oops, “heard”!
i need to slow down my typing speed or start catching my typos. thanks for the sharp eye.
Thanks sandhya!
Unfortunately, that snippet now makes me not want to read the book. Oh, she’s good, allright. I have changed my mind, a bit! What do you know? It’s got a quiteness, hasn’t it? I can see that now. I can see the charm of quietness.
Just having fun:
From time to time a man would call for Sang, wanting to marry her. Or, more properly, curious if she were someone he could marry. Calls at all hours, odd little messages left, hushed and rushed voices, saying they wanted to meet her. Where did they get the number? Friends, families, aunties, uncles – the usual crowd. She was young and pretty and smart and Bengali, said the usual crowd. So, calls at all hours, odd little messages left, and hurried snippets of conversation, full of odd claims about her: she was at Harvard, she was at Columbia, hadn’t she gone to NYU? Sangeeta, they called her, and Sang didn’t correct them. Why would she? She would see them once, and then never again.
Well, maybe she’s, um, different? Individuality. What a concept!
UMM, though the Howrah may be made of melted-down Nobels, Kolkata’s jinrickshaws run on outrage 🙂
Sorry she’s just a superficial writer. There is some distance between the author and the reader in her style. It’s like she made a pretty thing, which should be appreciated, but not touched. This veneer like many other writers is plastic on couches in formal living rooms, uncomfortable and awkward to sit on and hopelessly sad when the rooms are empty and unused.
Great writing to me interacts with the reader, makes them fall into traps and holes, go places not considered.
70 · sandhya said
This snippet is an example of what I don’t like about Jhumpa’s writing. She throws everything into the lines, almost as if she does not trust the reader to read between them. Every little detail of how Sangeeta feels, thinks; even the color of her eyes and how they vary, is cataloged in lieu of a possibly subtler telling, of the kind that Margaret Atwood is so good at.
Maybe Jhumpa is a believer in the James Brooks school of filmmaking, which substitutes the tedious process of character development with the device of the revelatory scene where the protagonist blurts out their pent-up feelings towards themselves, other characters, and the world at large, in one long monologue which then leaves everybody else initially shellshocked, and ultimately repentant. Life lessons are taught, not learnt, in this world.
Here’s a really, really dull excerpt.
And a better one, though it involves (of course) food.
And more interesting reviews.
Manish, do you run on outrage too?
A good interview appears in Book Forum, which answers specific questions about the individual stories in Unaccustomed Earth.
Two tid-bits:
What do people have to say about the latter response?
Is that bit about alcohol not being a part of life among average lower-middle-class or middle-class Indians true? My mom, whenever the subject of drinking comes up, never fails to gripe about how obscenely drunk men back in India used to get when alcohol was available…
not just in india – open-bar desi functions here result in plenty of uncles getting far more drunk than they normally do within the confines of thier well-stocked homes. and i doubt that it is purely due to their joy for the newlyweds/graduate/anniversaried couple etc 😉
re class – i’m not sure that there is much of a difference, except to the extent that some cannot afford a frivolity such as alcohol (but even then, there is a huge range amongst local varieties to satisfy). though, i guess there is one more difference as far as the general attitude/taboo of the different classes go. bar culture is pretty popular in a range of forms…
Jhumpa on the cover of the Improper Bostonian.
A very entertaining, bitchy review.
A fawning one.
You know I do. Kiss kiss.
Manish, are you a celeb?
There are pretty strong taboos against drinking in some classes in India. However, I have a feeling these are weakening,especially in urban India. An example of such taboos, is the imposition of prohibition in Andhra Pradesh in the early 90’s due to a village based anti alcohol movement.
Air-kissing? Very Bombay.
Manish, are you setting yourself up as the anti-Jhumpa? Is there a novel in the works in which that pithy, cutting wit’ll be deployed? Here’s what I’m seeing: Vij in bold authorial print (though, of course, in a smaller font than the title), and coverart which camouflages the Indianness of the novel. Is that what you went to Bombay for? Field research?
90 · Jhumpa’s foil? said
… pithy, cutting hyperlinked wit’ll …
80 · Rahul on April 3, 2008 02:04 PM · Direct link · “Quoteâ€(?)
“This snippet is an example of what I don’t like about Jhumpa’s writing.”
That’s it! I am writing you out of my will. My priceless Eliot collection now goes to my 15-year old even if she says “T.S. who?” upon discovering her unearned wealth.
In the average Indian village or small town, alcohol is not kept in the house or served to guests or drunk at dinner time. People who drink alcohol like that are considered of “low character”. However, MEN do get drunk and it’s on the downlow, not sitting around the dinner table sharing a glass of red with the wife.
Some Indian towns and villages have made alcohol illegal on the insistence of women who suffer abuse from drunk husbands. I remember reading about that several times in the Indian newspapers back home.
Perhaps if it was not such a social taboo, and wine or beer or whatever was considered an acceptable drink to share with one’s female family members during a meal, things would be different.
Again, gender issues.
Mom, get off the Internet!
That was my excuse for research of the starlet variety 🙂
So here’s the list: Lit: Jhumpa Music: Norah Telly: Padma Biz: Indra Space: Sunita
…..and??
5 on Amazon.
..and what’s with this amazonian psychocoercion? “Customer who bought this item also bought”
followed by.. “What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?” followed by.. “So You’d Like to… “
95 · Neale said
Comedy: Vijai Spelling: Nupur Politics: Swati Porn: Sunny
18 · Manish Vij said
Oye! What have you got against hydrological engineers? Hydrology isn’t a small topic. 🙂
She is the only person who makes me cry on a repeated basis and yet I keep coming back for more. Thanks Jhumpa for this beautiful collection. And thanks to Sandhya for the review. :0)
But you know, hey, some did. 🙂 And to us it’s not cliched. Perhaps there’s a generational difference here – I’m not quite as old as Jhumpa but getting there…and the Indian community was a lot smaller in our childhoods…it’s not like now where you have all these huge parties (at least in major cities) from childhood through college. It wouldn’t surprise me if a 20-25-year-old (don’t know how old you are, just using this as an example), especially in Cal or New York, would have trouble relating to the upbringing of a 40-year-old like Jhumpa.