Lahiri's Readers Growing Accustomed to Greatness
A Review of "Unaccustomed Earth" by Jhumpa Lahiri
Feb 19, 2009
In April, Lahiri’s latest collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (Vintage, ISBN 978-0-307-27825-8), comes out and it becomes clear that Lahiri is following in the footsteps of other great writes who have emigrated to the United States.
Like Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who first became known for his stories in the shtetls of Poland, many of Lahiri’s early stories were set in India.
And like Singer whose fiction eventually followed him to the United States, the same has happened with Lahiri, who was born in London, raised on Rhode Island and now lives in Brooklyn.
Echoes of Hawthorne
For an epigraph, Lahiri goes to “The Customs House,” a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
“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 worn-out soil,” Hawthorne wrote. “My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”
It works on two levels.
First, many of the characters in the eight stories in this collection are first generation Americans, the children of Indian immigrants, trying to find the balance between their home and the home of their parent.
Second, regardless of where Lahiri has come from, she has become as much of a New England writer as Hawthorne, Updike, Dickinson, Salinger.
Her characters take weekend trips to Vermont, leave Massachusetts homes and head through Maine, considering an ocean that “was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times.”
Death, Disempowerment, Isolation
From Ruma, still trying to get over her mother’s death and getting to know her father in the title story to Amit and Megan struggling to save their marriage in A Choice of Accomodations to the characters populating the trio of linked stories that close out the book, Lahiri has created people dealing with death, disempowerment and isolation.
“Growing up, her mother’s example — moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for her children and a household — had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma’s life now,” Lahiri writes, echoing Hawthorne.
Isolation?
“He did not want to be part of another family, part of the mess, the feuds, the demands, the energy of it.”
Disempowerment?
“She would slouch in her chair, looking bothered but resigned, as if a subway she were riding had halted between stations.”
Lahiri Grows Stronger
Lahiri’s first collection, Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner Books, June 1999 ISBN9780395927205), won the Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, the novel, The Namesake (Mariner Books, September 2004, ISBN9780618485222), was a bestseller that became an acclaimed movie.
This, her third book, shows Lahiri continues to grow stronger as a writer.
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