Author Lahiri celebrates humanity

Pulitzer winner finds truth and beauty in familiar relationships

By Jenny Shank, Special to the Rocky

Published April 3, 2008 at 3 p.m.

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Photo by Elena Seibert

Author Jhumpa Lahiri returns to her previous themes in her new collection of short stories.

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Jhumpa Lahiri surprised even herself when she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first published book, the collection The Interpreter of Maladies. She told one interviewer that she "didn't even think it was possible."

The spotlight that award shone on Lahiri did nothing to detract from her art. She went on to publish a well-received first novel, The Namesake, which inspired a recent movie. And in her engrossing new story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, the author seems more grounded than ever, digging deeper into her signature subject matter of the complex relationships between Bengali immigrants to the United States and their American children.

Lahiri's stories are quietly powerful, focused on the daily events of life, often built on the loving tide of criticism and concern parents and children direct at each other.

Each story is composed with rare elegance and grace. I enjoyed these pieces enough to read many of them several times, and yet I still can't figure out how Lahiri does it: She rarely produces plot twists or astonishing endings (as does Alice Munro); she's almost never overtly humorous (like Tobias Wolff or Lorrie Moore); in this collection she doesn't venture to India, as she did in her first collection, instead setting most stories in mundane suburban American locations (unlike the atmospheric Caribbean stories of Edwidge Danticat, for example). And yet Lahiri's tales equal the accomplishments of these other wonderful short story writers.

In every story in Unaccustomed Earth, all the elements she introduces through a careful accrual of detail slot into place by the end in a satisfying way.

One quality that stands out here is her absolute psychological accuracy: She writes with complete empathy from all types of characters' perspectives - men, women, old, young, American, Indian. Her characters are always compelling, even lovable, because they're so simply human.

Lahiri is skilled at expressing thoughts many people have, particularly about children and parental relationships, in an eloquent way.

For example, in the title story, she writes about a woman named Ruma's love of her young son: "With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times - simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small, sturdy limbs."

In the same story, Lahiri describes how Ruma feels when she's driving with her father in the passenger seat: "She was aware of her father quietly monitoring her driving, glancing now and then at the speedometer, looking along with her when she was about to switch lanes."

Even though Ruma is a grown, responsible adult, she's still a daughter driving her father, who might be unable to prevent himself from pressing his foot down to apply the passenger seat's imaginary brake.

One of the best stories in the book, Nobody's Business, features the sort of subject matter only Lahiri could make riveting. It's told from the perspective of a mild- mannered English lit grad student named Paul, who froze up and flunked his Ph.D. exam on the first try.

A beautiful Indian-American woman named Sang answers an ad seeking a roommate and moves into the Boston house that Paul shares with one other student. Paul develops a crush on Sang, who is involved in a strange relationship with an Egyptian man, who Paul discovers is cheating on her. Paul forces Sang to confront the truth, which brings the situation to its crisis.

With its roommate squabbles, love triangle and focus on the world of academia, the premise sounds like a lot of stories written in college creative writing programs. But Lahiri somehow makes this material as compelling as would one of the 19th-century Russian writers she so admires (Nikolai Gogol played a key role in The Namesake).

Another outstanding story, Only Goodness, is a tale of the relationship between a brother and sister. Although the younger brother, Rahul, looked as if he would outshine his older sister Sudha in her accomplishments, he spins out of control in college, becoming an alcoholic and dropping out of Princeton.

Only Goodness is a precise study of what it's like to have a non-functioning member of the family, portraying the self-rebuke Sudha feels for the fate of her beloved brother (because she introduced Rahul to alcohol as a teenager) alternating with her inability to keep caring about his situation because she needs to attend to her own life.

The story concludes with a heartbreaking attempt at reconciliation, when Rahul, newly sober, comes to visit Sudha in her London home and bonds with her baby, until his latent irresponsibility returns. Becoming a mother has left Sudha with one loyalty that trumps all the others and forces her to turn her back on her brother.

The final three stories in the collection comprise the linked tale of a relationship between two young Indian-Americans, Hema and Kaushik. Each story is complete and striking in itself, but reading the three together yields a highly dramatic, uncommon and ultimately tragic love story.

In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri manages to captivate, even while reworking story lines and situations similar to ones in her previous books. The consistently excellent quality of her work proves that the author doesn't need to reinvent herself with each book; she needs only to burrow deeper into the fertile ground from which her fiction has already blossomed.

Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. She writes about books for NewWest.net and lives in Boulder.

Unaccustomed Earth

* By Jhumpa Lahiri. Alfred A. Knopf, 333 pages, $25.

* Grade: A

Global reach

To say Lahiri's life is multicultural is an understatement. The author was born in London to parents who are natives of India. She was raised in Rhode Island and was married to Guatemalan-Greek journalist Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush in a Hindu ceremony that took place in Calcutta.

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