Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
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Book Reviews of Unaccustomed Earth
Book Review: Accustomed to Success - A Fine Collection of Eight Short Stories
Summary: 5 Stars
With UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, Jhumpa Lahiri can lay claim with good reason to being the finest short story writer in America today. This book, her second collection of short stories with the full-length novel THE NAMESAKE sandwiched between, is a masterful collection of affecting tales about family life and individual self-discovery. While Lahiri's focus is relentlessly drawn toward what might be termed the "Bengali-American experience," her stories express rich underlying elements of universality, allowing them to transcend the mere "new American immigrant" genre. She shows yet again that she is a marvelous craftswoman of the short story art form and its language (words, imagery, and symbolism).
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH is eight stories, divided into two sections. The first section contains five distinct short stories, beginning with the near-novella length title story that is certainly the collection's finest. In that piece, a daughter of Indian descent, Ruma, welcomes her unexpectedly widowered father with trepidation to her new home in Seattle. Ruma is married to a Caucasian named Adam, and they have a young son named Akash. In every respect the young family is a model of mixed marriage and, in Ruma's case, full cultural assimilation. Nevertheless, her father's visit promises to force Ruma to confront the inevitable fissures that appear between first and second generation immigrant families. Travel to new countries or settling into new lands, postcards of foreign places, the soil in gardening, and measurement of distances all serve in symbolic support to the story's title, but it is a simple misplaced and unmailed postcard that pulls everything together into a poignant ending.
Lahiri's other four stories in the first section have similar themes. In "Hell-Heaven," a young woman recalls her childhood when a fellow Bengali became a family friend and part of her (and, surprisingly, her mother's) life. In "A Choice of Accommodation," (another title laden with multiple meanings), a middle-aged, mixed marriage couple (Amit and Megan) rediscover themselves and a bit of their previously unstated history during a friend's wedding held at Amit's old boarding school. In "Only Goodness," a model Bengali daughter named Sudha, married and a new mother, tries to cope with her younger brother Rahul's alcoholic failings and her likely role in making him what he has become. Of all the characters in this book, it is Rahul who comes across most powerfully.
The second part of the book contains three intertwined stories involving two characters, one female and one male, at different stages of their lives. Hema and Kaushik are first thrown together by circumstances of the latter's parents having relocated to India and then returned to the Boston area. Hema's family agrees to put Kaushik's family up until they can find a new house of their own, turning Hema's life upside down and even tossing her from her bedroom (now occupied by the three-year-older Kaushik) and onto a cot in her parents room. Tragedy looms behind these events, but it is one which Hema's family is not aware. The first story is told from Hema's viewpoint, the second about three years later from Kaushik's, and the third about twenty years later from both viewpoints. As with her opening story "Unaccustomed Earth," Lahiri finds an ending that, while somewhat contrived, is nonetheless touching.
It is only in this final piece, "Going Ashore" (again a title with multiple meanings), that Lahiri brings her narratives into the present day. The earlier stories appear to take place mostly in about the 1980's, with references to VCR's and record players and telephones with long extension cords. They seem oddly removed from everyday reality, as if they represented a sort of wistful backward stare at a different era, to a time when America was still a shining light on a hill and India was a place to escape before the Internet age and globalization changed some of the balance in their relationship. By the time of "Going Ashore," both Hema and Kaushik are adrift in global waters, world citizens who travel freely, lack strong personal attachments, and exist without the roots of family and place and culture that those of the prior generation clearly demonstrated in the earlier stories. Even their careers are disassociative: Hema's as a researcher of the ancient Etruscan civilization, Kaushik's as a photographer of world events who stands forever outside the very events whose images he captures.
If I had one criticism of UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, it would be Lahiri's seemingly incessant focus on one group of Bengalis, the academically-striving, economically prosperous, high achievers. Story after story expresses variations on the same themes from among the same types of people. Lahiri offers repeated mixed marriages (Ruma and Adam, Pranab and Deborah, Amit and Megan, Sudha and Roger Featherstone, Rahul and Elena). Nearly everyone is a PhD - perhaps that is what makes Rahul and Kaushik seem so refreshingly real - and everyone is an academic overachiever whose alma maters would make even US News & World Report blush - Princeton, MIT, Radcliffe, Harvard Medical School, Columbia, U Penn, London School of Economics, Cornell, NYU, Bryn Mawr, Tufts, Colgate, Swarthmore. One character has actually been slumming as a physics professor at Michigan State, but thankfully he's finally on his way to the more acceptable MIT. There must be other Bengalis in America worth writing about, and there must be other stories that do not lead one to paraphrase Tolstoy with, "Every happy Bengali family is alike, and every unhappy Bengali family is also unhappy in the same way."
Here's hoping that Ms. Lahiri can apply her brilliant writing skills (...clusters of swallows like giant thumbprints swiping the sky...") to a broader canvas in future works; the results promise to be stunning. In the meantime, be pleased as a reader to sit quietly and relish a master at work in these eight compelling and emotionally satisfying short stories. They are well worth the time.
Book Review: Is it just me, or do Lahiri's (typically Indian-American residents of the northeastern US) characters tend to have a PhD?
Summary: 4 Stars
Recent Brooklyn transplant to a Seattle suburb near Lake Washington thirty-eight-year old Ruma (attorney-at-law), a twelve weeks pregnant stay-at-home mother of a three-year-old, lives with her non-Indian husband (MBA) who is away on business. Her father (PhD in biochemistry), who recently lost his wife and embarked on a series of group tours during which he became involved with a Bengali woman (PhD in statistics), stays with his daughter as a sort of vacation from vacationing. But the story of their relationship is overshadowed by unusual plot choices in statement or occurrence. Unlikely although not impossible (I looked them up): her mother's odds defying cause of death, the chances of taking a day trip to Victoria, B.C. with a youngster (over four hours one way), the fact that her exceedingly capable father can't locate himself a post office, and that he is forced to quit gardening one due to the presence of mosquitoes. As well, he writes to a friend (p 50) "no rain here [in Seattle] in summer." Equally ridiculous are Ruma's ruminations related to her three-year-old son. She complains that he (p 10) "would throw himself without warning on the ground" and, not having told him about her pregnancy, "was convinced he'd figured it out already." And although the adults use their hands to eat traditional Indian food, he's not allowed because: (p 22), "this was something Ruma had not taught him to do." She even laments her father's grandfatherly care, complaining that (p 38), "He had not paid this sort of attention" when she and her brother (a Fulbright scholar) were growing up. Thankfully, things get better when the author moves to more familiar territory.
Hell-Heaven, narrated by an Indian-American girl, is about an intelligent Bengali man (studying engineering at MIT) who is welcomed into her family and acts like an uncle to her. The girl's married infatuated mother becomes jealous of his relationship with a non-Indian student (of philosophy, parents are professors). In Choice Accommodations (my least favorite), an Indian-American man (managing editor of a medical journal, his father, an ophthalmologist) returns to the town where he went to an all-male boarding school to attend the wedding of the daughter of the school's headmaster. His non-Indian wife (an M.D.) accompanies him. Only Goodness (my favorite story because of its utterly imperfect characters) follows the relationship between Indian-American siblings: a young man's descent into alcoholism and the guilt-ridden, successful sister (masters in International Relations, Economics, her husband, an India born Englishman, has a PhD in art history) who believes she started him on that path. Nobody's Business, told from the perspective of a PhD candidate in Literature, tells of his infatuation with a 30-year-old Bengali girl (majoring in philosophy at NYU) and her Egyptian commitment-phobic boyfriend of three years (a Harvard Middle Eastern history professor).
Part Two contains three related stories. The first, Once in a Lifetime, is narrated by one of two recurring characters, a 13-year-old girl (her Dad has a PhD), who, in 1981, is forced to give up her room for a month for the other recurrer, a 16-year-old boy, and his parents (Dad has a PhD in Civil Engineering), who plan to move back to the States. The last time they had seen each other was four years previously when her mother held a going away party for his family. Her mother is disappointed in the apparent change (for the worse) in his mother's behavior. The story ends with the revelation of a family secret. The second, Year's End, picks up a couple of years later, this time from the young man's view. He visits at Christmas and tries to fit in to a new family situation. The final story, Going Ashores, alternates between the lives of each of the two characters. She (a PhD) is visiting Rome while awaiting her wedding, an arranged marriage (to a physics professor at Michigan State, PhD). He (college grad) is also there. They meet unexpectedly through a mutual acquaintance and reestablish a relationship.
Overall, the stories were excellent. I especially liked Only Goodness and those about Hema and Kaushik (except that the first was written as if Hema were speaking directly to Kaushik directly - and vice versa for the second). Unaccustomed Earth, although perfectly titled, is not as good as Interpreter of Maladies, but far better than The Namesake. Also good, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
Book Review: Competent But Could Have Been Great
Summary: 3 Stars
When "The Interpreter of Maladies" was published in 2000 the only word one could use to describe Jhumpa Lahiri is phenom. Almost fifty years ago the young Southern writer Carson McCullers stunned the literary establishment with her debut novel "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter," and here was another young unknown writer expressing the extraordinarily emotional moments of the everyday and ordinary in pristine and polished, mature and haunting prose.
"Unaccustomed Earth" is Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection of short stories. The title story is about a father, who recently lost his wife and who visits his daughter for one week. It's a story of two different people who have always misunderstood each other dealing in different ways with the grief of losing the most important person in their life. The father feels liberated, having thought that his wife was too demanding and strident. Recently retired he has also happily found a companion for his world travels. His daughter Ruma, who was very close with her mother, never allows herself to grieve, and instead opts to throw herself into motherhood, trying hard to repeat her mother's life. She leaves a legal career to focus on raising her son, is pregnant with a second child, and -- just like her mother -- is silently angry at a successful but absent husband.
Ruma takes one step further in becoming her mother by asking her father to stay with her. The father, now much wiser and freer, refuses, and wants to tell Ruma about his new companion but can't quite bring himself to doing it. In the end he subconsciously leaves a postcard to his companion where it can be easily found, and upon finding it Ruma is at first hurt and angry but finally mails it herself, thereby finally freeing her father.
This first story is by far the best story in this collection, and the rest in Lahiri's book disappoint with their triviality and inconsequence -- the biggest disappointment is a three-part saccharine story of two star-struck lovers which is just lame and silly.
There are two stories though that if developed to their full potential could have been great. There is a story of an Indian boy who goes to an elite American boarding school, and falls in love with the headmaster's daughter Pam, the symbol and embodiment of what he could never obtain. Two decades later he finds closure by attending Pam's wedding at the boarding school, where he makes passionate love with his wife in the same dorm room where he spent his teenage years haunted by his social ostracization.
And then there's another story of a sister and her alcoholic brother, and the hint that the gifted and handsome younger brother fell into alcoholism because of his devout love for his sister. It was she who snuck beer cans into his room, and when she went to college and they could no longer be together he might have turned to alcohol just to be with her again.
In both stories the promise that there's something deep and disturbing lurking under the surface is subtle. But it's way too subtle.
Jhumpa Lahiri is an extremely gifted writer, far more talented than any of her peers but it just doesn't seem as though she's trying hard enough. Lahiri needs to wrestle with her characters more, break away from them, and probe deeper into their dark psychologies. Her talent and her wisdom rival those of Raymond Carver -- the master of the short story -- and she needs to study more the brevity and depth of his prose. Lahiri's stories can be powerfully affecting at her best but Carver at his best is just absolutely devastating -- the beautiful poignancy of his prose reveals that he is haunted and plagued by his perceptions and understanding of the human condition in a way that no one can fully appreciate.
Alas, Lahiri's prose is beautiful and compelling enough for her to be able to get away with predictable plotlines and underdeveloped characters. Carson McCullers would never achieve the same success she had with her debut, and after reading "Unaccustomed Earth" one must wonder if Lahiri would share McCullers' fate.
Book Review: "My children ... shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth."
Summary: 4 Stars
Ever since the publication of her mesmerizing, Pulitzer Prize winning debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri has established herself as one of modern fiction's most powerful voices. The stories in that collection showcased what was to become Lahiri's trademark: acute psychological observations, eloquent writing, detailed descriptions, and a fiercely intelligent structure. As in poetry, each word feels carefully chosen, yet the overall ease with which the narratives flow belies the effort that undoubtedly went into them. "Interpreter of Maladies" also served to debut Lahiri's dominant theme in that each story featured Indian characters struggling to adapt to new surroundings after immigrating to the U.S. Her sophomore effort, The Namesake: A Novel expanded this theme into a wonderful full-length novel about the gap between a boy born and raised in America and his immigrant parents, who cling to their old traditions and ways of life. Lahiri, who was herself born in London but raised in New England, has made a career out of telling stories of cultural displacement, and until now she never once faltered when it came to crafting a powerful story.
"Unaccustomed Earth" marks Lahiri's return to the short story format, and while I had been looking forward to it with high anticipation, the product is surprising. Perhaps Lahiri succeeded at the transition from short stories to novels a little too well, because suddenly it feels like she has much more to say in an all-too-limited page count. The shortest story in the collection is "Hell-Heaven," which at twenty-four pages would have been right at home in "Interpreter of Maladies," and while it is one of the better offerings it feels clipped, as though there was so much more to say and not enough time to say it. Instead, the stories in "Unaccustomed Earth" verge on novella territory, allowing Lahiri to indulge in the slow-burn style she perfected in "The Namesake". The last three stories interlock to tell a single story in three parts, completing this effect. There aren't many authors who are at their best when they take their time, but Lahiri seems to be one of them. But this is a minor complaint.
I do, however, have more pointed concerns after reading Lahiri's latest work. Firstly, she seems to have acquired a taste for the melodramatic that doesn't suit her elegant style at all. Lahiri's writing is always very restrained when it comes to emotions, which is one of her strong suits, so when she indulges in plot contrivances such as alcoholism and abusive relationships it feels forced and more than a little jarring. Quiet desperation is more apt for her style; it is what makes it feel so authentic. Melodrama makes it feel theatrical. The high points of "Unaccustomed Earth" are its beginning and ending, "Unaccustomed Earth" and the saga of Hema and Kaushik, which notably steer clear of these plot elements. Luckily, Lahiri seems incapable of writing anything that doesn't maintain a grip on realism, but it still felt out of place to this reader.
Secondly, Lahiri's characters are starting to suffer from a degree of sameness. Perhaps that is why she infused the melodrama that I just discussed into the collection's middle section, but the fact that each character seems to have an ivy-league education and a doctorate and strikingly similar back stories still begins to feel stultifying.
Despite these complaints, Lahiri remains one of the most psychologically astute writers out there, and her keen plotting and pointed observations make "Unaccustomed Earth" tower head and shoulders above most other literary offerings. And even though I feel warier about what direction her next book will take, I still have the utmost faith in her abilities and look forward to it with the same degree of anticipation that I waited for "Unaccustomed Earth".
Grade: B+
Book Review: One of her best work to date
Summary: 5 Stars
Jhumpa Lahiri's first short story collection, INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, won the Pulitzer Prize. Her debut novel, THE NAMESAKE, was an international bestseller and, in 2007, was made into a critically praised feature film. Where does this accomplished author go from here?
As her new short story collection, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, proves, Lahiri's fiction just gets better and better. These eight long, deftly developed stories probe the overarching themes and subjects of her career --- the adjustments made by Bengali immigrants as they attempt to adapt to American culture, the differentiation between "home" and "roots," the ways in which our visions of ourselves are composed both of heritage and new experiences.
The title of the collection comes from a quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne's THE CUSTOMS HOUSE, which serves as the book's epigraph: "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. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." This idea --- of new generations taking root in new soil --- runs through all the stories here.
Lahiri's epigraph is not the only debt she owes to Hawthorne and other classic short-story writers like him. Although her concerns might be modern, Lahiri's mode of storytelling is distinctly old-fashioned, hearkening back to writers like Hawthorne himself, as well as Hardy, Chekhov and Hemingway. Her stories, unlike those of many of the (at times) self-indulgent post-modern story practitioners working today, unfold slowly, gradually, into miniature works of great beauty and profundity. There's nothing flashy here --- no gimmicks, no snarky humor --- just near-impeccable storytelling driven by memorable characters and situations.
In the title story, a woman who has recently moved to Seattle with her American husband and their young son anxiously awaits the arrival of her widowed father, making the first visit since his wife's death. Ruma fears that, in accordance with Bengali custom, her father will expect to move in with the young family. But he has a secret of his own, one that will shape not only their short visit together but also their impressions of one another.
In "Only Goodness," Sudha always looked out for her younger brother Rahul, determined to give him the kind of traditional American childhood she never had, since her parents were too busy adapting to a new country to give her the trappings of childhood indulgence. But when Rahul, now a young man, disappoints his family repeatedly and slips into self-destructive alcoholism, Sudha must decide for herself where to set limits on her allowances for her brother.
Probably the most emotionally wrenching of the stories is the story arc "Hema and Kaushik," a set of three loosely intertwined short stories that follow two children of Bengali immigrants from adolescence to adulthood. Like a good novel, these tales manage to invest readers deeply in their characters, both of whom, like many of Lahiri's characters, find it hard to interpret the true meaning of "home." Those who have shared Hema and Kaushik's decades-long journey will be deeply moved by the final story's closing paragraphs, as both characters encounter very different sorts of tragedies.
Many readers who loved THE NAMESAKE may be reluctant to pick up a collection of short stories, a genre that has gained an unfortunate reputation for inaccessibility and opaqueness. To miss out on this collection, though, would be to overlook not only the best work of Lahiri's stellar career to date but also one of the finest works of fiction published so far this year.