Passages from India

Jhumpa Lahiri's first collection of stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, earned the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for 2000 and other awards and was translated into more than thirty languages. Her first novel, The Namesake, was also highly regarded and quickly became a movie. The well-nigh universal appeal of Lahiri's fiction is easy to understand, given the increasing mobility of the global population and our increasing and sometimes discomforting, even violent, awareness of different cultures. Indeed cultural unease is Lahiri's pervasive subject, and her accounts and, to a lesser degree, her analyses of such distress are sharply observant. But it is not, I think, unjust to remark that she gives more attention to clothes and food than to, for example, politics, religion, and language.

I came to Lahiri's second collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, having just read Arthur Herman's excellent dual biography, Ghandi and Churchill. Steeped in the ancient, turbulent, brutally complex history of India, I was struck by how seldom thoughts of their mother country impinge on the consciousness of Lahiri's immigrants except in the most personal and incidental terms. Many of them annually return home, and they communicate with family and friends left behind, but India as a vital geopolitical phenomenon seems hardly to exist for them. This is simply another way of saying that Lahiri's settings are largely domestic, in both senses of that word (but not as a euphemism for "a woman's writer," though that charge, if that's what it is, has been leveled—and not altogether unreasonably).

Even though the stories in Unaccustomed Earth are longer than those in the first collection, the pace and structure suffer. There are pages that read like bald exposition, even when the authorial intent is narrative. On the sentence level Lahiri's style remains controlled to the point of creaminess, even if at times a bit too proper: "She felt flattered by his interest in the place in which she lived." There are passages, even pages, that teeter on the brink of banality, and Lahiri threatens to become one of those writers for whom any and every experience finds its way into what passes for fiction. But more often, as in the title story, characters come suddenly to life and discover, understand, appreciate one another in ways we do not foresee. In both collections Lahiri is especially alert when it comes to dissecting the discord between the assimilated and the unassimilated, discord often complicated further by generational and gender confusions. By and large men come off much less attractively than women in Unaccustomed Earth, and first-generation parents are inevitably autocratic in their ambitions for offspring. These and certain other motifs seem more insistent and obvious than in the first collection.

Lahiri is a product of one of the more prestigious factories in the Creative Writing Workshop Industry USA, so it is conceivable that in this new collection she is trying to shake off the constraints of the workshop mindset. On the other hand, perhaps she was pressured into publishing a second collection too soon: the last three stories, linked by the same two central characters, could be parts of an aborted novel or novel in progress. Perhaps she has been influenced by Alice Munro, but her stories lack the breadth and depth of the best work of Munro (who has been developing her art for much longer than Lahiri, a relatively young writer.) The jacket copy for Unaccustomed Earth does her a subtle disservice in claiming that she is "at the peak of her powers," a claim this new book does not warrant. For all her success and celebrity and for all the pleasures her writing affords, she has not yet joined the ranks of Jhabvala, Gordimer, Paley, O'Connor (Frank or Flannery), Peter Taylor, Updike, Cheever, Carver, Thom Jones, Munro, and any number of others. I look forward to her progress toward that pantheon.