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 The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations.”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.)

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