Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters tend to be immigrants from India and their US-reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither: too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully.
These Indian-born parents want the American Dream for their children — name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy house in the suburbs — but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land, and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the US for their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but completely at home in neither; they always experience themselves as standing slightly apart, given more to melancholy observation than wholehearted participation.
As she did in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and her dazzling 2003 novel The Namesake, Lahiri writes about these people in Unaccustomed Earth with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts, using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision: the faint taste of coconut in the Nice cookies that a man associates with his dead wife; the Wonder Bread sandwiches, tinted green with curry, that a Bengali mother makes for her embarrassed daughter to take to school.
A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder of Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.
Many of the characters in these stories seem to be in relationships that are filled with silences and black holes. In some cases this is the result of an arranged marriage that’s never worked out; in others it is simply a case of people failing to communicate or failing to reach out, in time, for what they want.
In Only Goodness Sudha, who is working on her second master’s degree at the London School of Economics, wonders at the bizarre “lack of emotion” in her parents’ marriage, which was “neither happy nor unhappy” and seemingly devoid of both bitterness and ardor, but she finds her own marriage to an Englishman foundering upon her failure to tell him a family secret.
In Hell-Heaven the narrator recounts the story of her parents’ chilly marriage and her mother’s passionate, unrequited love for a fellow Bengali and family friend, who gave her mother “the only pure happiness she ever felt.”
And in A Choice of Accommodations Amit realizes that the “most profound thing” in his life — the birth of his daughters — has already happened, that the rest of his life will be only “a continuation of the things” he already knows. Increasingly he will come to regard solitude — a run in the park, a ride by himself on the subway — as “what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane.”
As for Ruma, the heroine of the title story, she realizes during a visit from her widowed father that they rarely talk about matters of real importance; they do not speak about her mother or her brother, they do not discuss her pregnancy or her marriage, or her father’s new relationship with a woman he met on vacation.
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