Self-searching to the ends of Unaccustomed Earth
By Kate Rockwood
Published: May 20th, 2008 | 2:15pm
Wonder Bread sandwiches stained green with curry. No other image quite captures the heart of Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of stories about the children of Benagli-American immigrants who struggle to define and inhabit a coherent home in the States.
Cultural assimilation is a theme Lahiri has worried over before in her first book Interpreter of Maladies, which became the first short story collection to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and her novel, The Namesake. In this new work, Lahiri turns her attention from the Bengali immigrants to their children, from first generation immigrants to second.
Maybe it’s because the author is a second-generation immigrant herself that the stories feel more intimate than her previously published work. Lahiri, who is of Bengali descent, was born in London, raised in Rhode Island, and now lives in Brooklyn, has said many of these stories predate The Namesake and some have been on her backburner for as long as a decade. The writer’s language — always spare and subtle, always sophisticated — feels even more rich and nuanced in these quiet tales.
One difference in the attitudes of this set of characters is that unlike their parents, they don’t follow a single path from India to America for the sake of ambition. Instead, they crisscross the globe pursuing love, fleeing illness, or searching — restlessly, relentlessly — for a sense of self.
In the title story, Ruma has moved across the country with her young son for the sake of her husband’s job, shelving her own career as a lawyer for a life of affluent isolation in Seattle. Mourning the loss of her dead mother, she prepares for her elderly father’s visit by anxiously debating whether or not she should invite him to live with her. The agonizing decision is turned inside out, however, when Ruma realizes that her father is content in the new life he has made for himself, without the obligations of family or marriage. It is she who desperately craves the familial and the familiar, a sense of tradition.
The collection’s last three stories form a novella centering around Hema and Kaushik, who first are thrown together by fate as teenagers when Kaushik’s family stays with Hema’s family while searching for a home in America. Hema is wide-eyed and infatuated with the brooding teen. A decade later they meet again, Kaushik struggling over the loss of his mother and his father’s remarriage.
In the final story, “Going Ashore,” it is a chance meeting at a dinner party in Rome that brings the two together, Kaushik now a far-flung photojournalist and Hema about to settle into an arranged marriage after a decade’s affair with a married lover. They are drawn to each other as much by love as by their shared past, the memories of childhood trips to India and the searching on that shore and this for a sense of belonging. Each story is slow and spare, the characters deepening almost imperceptibly until the novella’s very last lines, when the resignation and sadness of a character’s loss is heartbreaking.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Unaccustomed Earth: Stories
By Jhumpa Lahiri
352 pages, $25
Issue #25
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