An Unfamiliar Life?

With her Pulitzer-Prize winning collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, and her novel The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri established herself as a most sensitive and rich writer of the Bengali-American experience. Her work is and has always been about more than just immigration and its discontents.

An Unaccustomed Earth boasts the same elegant prose and profound wisdom that characterized Lahiri’s other works. The stories unravel bit by bit, bursting with the type of intrigue that might be found in a mystery novel or a thriller. But the depths of their emotional landscape would never allow them to be characterized as such. The reader is privy to innermost thoughts and sentiments of the characters in these eight meticulously woven stories. But their fate remains vague until the end, leaving the reader in continual suspense regarding the smallest details of their lives. Each story is a minefield of powerful feelings and, at times, surprisingly dire consequences.

Some of these questions are answered, others are left to interpretation. Regardless, each plot is unusually thought-provoking, even though Lahiri executes them like a scientist or reporter without judgment. The other stories in the collection are equally compelling. In “Heaven-Hell,” a young girl witnesses her mother’s descent into depression after a young Bengali student, Pranab marries an American woman, Deborah. In “A Choice of Accomodations,” Amit attends the wedding of a woman he met in boarding school with his American doctor wife, Megan, all the while feeling like his marriage is dead. “Only Goodness” also features characters in mixed relationships. Well into her marriage to Roger, Sudha continues to feel guilty about introducing her younger brother, Rahul, to alcohol:  Rahul, who is involved with Elena and treats her daughter, Crystal, as his own child, can’t seem to shake his addiction. In “Nobody’s Business,” graduate student Paul silently harbors a crush on his roommate, Sang, who refuses the polite advances of Bengali suitors and considers herself practically engaged to her hot-tempered boyfriend, Farouk.  

The question of whether or not these mixed relationships work never arises. That is a given. Most of the characters show the capacity to fall deeply, hopelessly in love and are often overwhelmed with desire. They stay with their lovers or partners through thick and thin, giving the stories a romantic, “love conquers all” feeling—at least until their denouement. Culture affects the characters but does not create a divide between them. But it is sadness—much more than love—that drives each story:  Ruma’s loneliness, Usha’s mother’s desperation, Sudha’s guilt, Amit’s emptiness, Paul’s solitary longing, and most notably, Kaushik’s grief.

In “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories, the sorrow is more pronounced than in the others. In the first story, thirteen-year-old Hema crushes on sixteen-year-old Kaushik when he and his family stay in her home, but Hema’s family is confused by their friends’ unusually rude behavior—until it is revealed that Kaushik’s mother is dying. Her slow descent is described in painstaking detail, laying the ground for the haunting feeling that characterizes the next story, when, years later, Kaushik meets his stepmother, Chitra. He does not attend his father’s wedding, and this decision seems understandable; his resentment of Chitra and her daughters, inevitable. His lashing out would be surprising in other books, but it seems fitting in Lahiri’s world. “Well, you’ve seen it for yourselves, how beautiful my mother was. How much prettier and more sophisticated than yours. Your mother is nothing in comparison,” Kaushik tells Piu and Rupa, his two young stepsisters who all but worship him. During his walk along the cliffs overlooking the Bay of Fundy, “where the wind ripped and chewed through everything, and the water was a sheer drop down,” his uncontrollable anguish comes to surface, but it is quickly buried, along with the memory of his mother. In the third story of the trio, when Kaushik is predictably reunited with Hema, his loss gnaws at him, directly and indirectly, and forcefully and subtly.

An Unaccustomed Earth abounds with the stereotypes and platitudes of Bengali culture that filled Lahiri’s previous works. Desperate housewives lurk in every corner. There is Ruma’s deceased mother, who would have assumed she could visit her daughter in her new home in Seattle, “who would not have asked.” Usha’s mother, who feels proud when Pranab gorges on her cooking. Chitra, who feeds Kaushik in the “old-fashioned, ceremonious way I remembered my grandfathers eating in Calcutta, being treated like kings after their morning baths.” And then there are Sudha and Rahul, who were for years compared to other Bengali children—until Rahul is no longer someone who should be compared to the others when he became “what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributing to the grand circle of accomplishments Bengali children were making across the country, as surgeons or attorneys or scientists, or writing articles for the front page of The New York Times.” What’s ironic, though, is that many of the Bengali children in these stories grow up to be unusually successful professors and lawyers, climbing their respective ladders without any apparent difficulty.

Sangeeta Mehta has worked as a book editor at Simon & Schuster and Little, Brown. She is currently a freelance editor living in New York City.

Praise for An Unaccustomed Earth

“Splendid . . . The fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself–accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs–is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri’s sensitive new collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth. . . . .
Lahiri’s epigraph . . . from ‘The Custom-House,’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne, [is] an apt, rich metaphor for the transformations Lahiri oversees in these pages, in which two generations of Bengali immigrants to America–the newcomers and their hyphenated children–struggle to build normal, secure lives. . . . .
Except for their names, ‘Hema and Kaushik’ [the title characters of the final trilogy of stories] could evoke any American’s ’70s childhood, any American’s bittersweet acceptance of the compromises of adulthood. The generational conflicts Lahiri depicts cut across national lines; the waves of admiration, competition and criticism that flow between their two families could occur between Smiths and Taylors in any suburban town; and the fight for connection and control between Hema and Kaushik–as children and as adults–replays the tussle that has gone on ever since men and women lived in caves.
Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth.”

–Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

“Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters tend to be immigrants from India and their American-reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither: too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully. . . . Ms. Lahiri writes about these people in Unaccustomed Earth with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts, using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision . . . A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends. [Lahiri] deftly explicates the emotional arithmetic of her characters’ families . . . showing how some of the children learn to sidestep, even defy, their parents’ wishes. But she also shows how haunted they remain by the burden of their families’ dreams and their awareness of their role in the generational process of Americanization. . . The last three overlapping tales tell a single story about a Bengali-American girl and a Bengali-American boy, whose crisscrossing lives make up a poignant ballad of love and loss and death. They embark on a passionate affair that concludes not with a fairy-tale happy ending but with a denouement that speaks of missed opportunities and avoidable grief. . . . an ending that possesses the elegiac and haunting power of tragedy–a testament to Lahiri’s emotional wisdom and consummate artistry as a writer.”
 
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Stunning. [Lahiri] delves deeply and richly into the lives of immigrants. [But though] immigrants may be the stories’ protagonists, their doubts, insecurities, losses and heartbreaks belong to all of us. Never before has Lahiri mined so perfectly the secrets of the human heart. . . . In part, Lahiri’s gift to the reader is gorgeous prose that bestows greatness on life’s mundane events and activities. But it is her exploration of lost love and lost loved ones that gives her stories an emotional exactitude few writers could ever hope to match.”

–Carol Memmott, USA Today

“Shimmering . . . The literary prize committees should once again take note . . . To read [Unaccustomed Earth] and only take away an experience of cultural tourism would be akin to reading Dante only to retain how medieval Italians slurped their spaghetti. Lahiri’s fiction delves deep into the universal theme of isolation. . . . Lahiri is a lush writer bringing to life worlds through a pile-up of detail. But somehow all that richness electrifyingly evokes the void. . . . It’s customary when reviewing short story collections to adopt a ‘one from column A, two from column B’ kind of structure–you know, the title story always gets a ritual nod, followed by a run-down of which stories are the strongest, which have just been included for filler. But another stereotype-confounding aspect of Lahiri’s writing is that there aren’t any weak stories here: every one seems like the best, the most vivid, until you read the next one. . . . Lahiri ingeniously reworks the situation of characters subsisting at point zero, of being stripped down like Lear on the heath. [Unaccustomed Earth] certainly makes a contribution to the literature of immigration, but it also takes its rightful place with modernist tales from whatever culture in which characters find themselves doomed to try and fail to only connect.”

–Maureen Corrigan, “Fresh Air”

“Profound . . . Powerful . . . Haunting . . . Lahiri’s prose here is deceptively simple, its mechanics invisible, as she enters into her characters’ innermost journeys. [In the title story,] the moment-to-moment rendering of Ruma’s vulnerability and her father’s rising panic at all that he’s keeping secret sweeps the reader into a compelling emotional landscape. . . . Lahiri invests [her characters] with great depth. [She is] a writer working at the height of her powers.”

–Lisa Fugard, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Peripatetic, sweeping stories–Lahiri’s best yet–which move from Boston to Bombay and back again to evoke intricate topologies of emotion and characters who often feel more at home abroad. [They] possess the gravitational pull of short novels. . . . The final three stories, a trilogy in which an educated, thoroughly American girl’s choice of an arranged marriage over romantic love (a decision Lahiri deftly makes relatable) has cataclysmic repercussions, form the rhapsodic culmination to the collection. Lahiri, a master storyteller–who, along with Alice Munro, has arguably done more to reinvigorate the once-moribund form than any other contemporary English-language writer–comes full circle with this book, imbued as it is with a sense of passage, of life and death and rebirth.”

–Megan O’Grady, Vogue

“Five of five stars. . . . Commanding and seamless . . . There might not be a better book of fiction by an American writer published this year. . . . Extraordinary . . . The long, absorbing ‘Unaccustomed Earth,’ the title story [deals with] familiar themes [for Lahiri]: the alienation that Indian immigrant parents feel toward their American-reared children and the guilt those children feel as they assimilate into the melting pot of the U.S. But as she proved in Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, Lahiri writes so compellingly about these conflicts and pays such careful attention to the most emotionally telling of details that each story feels freshly minted. . . . The range of human experiences [Lahiri] chronicles is epic, again and again. [‘Hell-Heaven’ is] a universal story of yearning and unrequited desire, rooted so specifically and powerfully in a sense of time and place that we feel as if we are living right alongside the characters . . . For all that’s comfortingly familiar about Unaccustomed Earth, though, one of its chief pleasures is that it shows Lahiri stretching in entirely new directions. In ‘A Choice of Accommodations,’ for instance, the author serves up a slice of Updike-ian Americana while managing to put her own distinct twist on the proceedings. . . . ‘Only Goodness,’ arguably the strongest story in the collection, gets under your skin like nothing Lahiri has written before. The first five stories are varied and accomplished [and the final three] are gripping and affecting . . . Whereas so many story collections feel like uneven grab-bags, Unaccustomed Earth seems to have poured forth from the author’s pen in one swoop, and it eloquently circles back over the same sets of themes and motifs without growing tired. It’s like a symphony in eight movements.”

–Christopher Kelly, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

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