The Modern Story

Life's Little Tragedies

by D.H. Beunam

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

At a reading in Miami, Florida in April, Jhumpa Lahiri was asked by a member of the audience if she thought she would ever write about people who weren’t Bengali, or Indian. The Pulitzer prize-winning author replied, appropriately, that she felt many writers typically wrote about a certain people (she cited Joyce’s Dubliners as an example) and went on to say that although she may well be writing about first or second generation Indian immigrants in America, she was always seeking out something new, some unexplored territory, in her examination of the human condition.

The point was, of course, that the cultural background of Lahiri’s characters is not a limitation in her fiction.

Nowhere is this more evident than in her latest collection of long stories, Unaccustomed Earth (Knopf), a handful of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. True, her typically American-born characters are often caught between the expectations of their Indian parents and the allure of American society, but for all the specificity of their cultural backgrounds, Lahiri’s characters are everymen and everywomen, leading somewhat (outwardly, at least) unremarkable lives, struggling with love, family and death.

The first thing that deserves to be said is that Lahiri has a gift for detail, knowing exactly what to include and what to omit. The lives of her characters, down to the tiniest domestic detail, are utterly convincing. In the title story, for example, it takes only the opening paragraph for the reader to be completely captivated and involved:

After her mother's death, Ruma's father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began travelling in Europe, a continent he'd never seen. In the past year he had visited France, Holland, and most recently Italy. They were package tours, travelling in the company of strangers, riding by bus through the countryside, each meal and museum and hotel prearranged. He was gone for two, three, sometimes four weeks at a time. When he was away Ruma did not hear from him. Each time, she kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news, to make sure there hadn't been a plane crash anywhere in the world.

While the narrative focus shifts skillfully between Ruma and her father, readers observe how differently the two deal with life after the death of Ruma’s mother, and on how many levels the dialogue between them works.

Lahiri unveils the lives of characters without becoming sentimental and without judging them. She understands and seems sympathetic toward human beings and our conflicting emotions and desires. Consider, for example, the looming threat of a marital crisis in “A Choice of Accommodations”, when, attending the wedding of an old friend with his wife Megan, Amit ponders:

Wasn’t it terrible after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one’s life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person, as Amit missed Megan night after night, that solitude was what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?

Family plays an important role in most of stories in Unaccustomed Earth. In “Only Goodness”, the promising Sudha tries to relinquish the parental role her somewhat distant parents have endowed her with as she pursues a life and family of her own in London, despite the increasing problem of her younger brother’s alcoholism. At one point in the story, as Sudha's parents ask if she and her husband could ask Rahul not to drink at their wedding reception, Sudha snaps:

“No,” Sudha said, pushing back her chair and standing up. She had been fiddling all this time with her teaspoon, and she flung it now, ineffectually, on the carpeted floor of the dining room, where it fell without sound. “I can't talk to him anymore. I can't fix him. I can't keep fixing what's wrong with this family,” she said, and like her brother only a little while earlier, she stormed out of the room.

There is an unusual maturity in her writing, in the way she conjures, with controlled and eloquent prose, situations that could just as easily have become dull or cliché. She kas a keen sense of the subtle nuances and complexities of our emotions, and an ear for the things we say and – more importantly – the things we don’t. Unaccustomed Earth is a collection worthy of Richard Ford’s Women with Men, or the longer stories of Richard Yates. Within the form, there is no higher praise. She is a brilliant writer.

D.H. Beunam is a regular contributor to The Modern Story.