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 The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations.”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