The 10%: A Review Of Unaccustomed Earth

April 10

I’ve been avidly following Jhumpa Lahiri’s work since her debut collection of short stories won the Pulitzer. That’s no easy thing, landing the most coveted prize in literature on your first try. Lahiri followed this triumph with a novel, The Namesake, which was short-listed for half a dozen other awards and made into a middling film by Mira Nair. Last week, she gave us Unaccustomed Earth, a short story collection that is darker and more pensive than either of her previous works. I would argue that Interpreter of Maladies is still her best book--the stories are exquisitely realized, and the prose feels like a couture suit: fitted, elegant, spare. Few writers can make economy that beautiful.

About the quality of Lahiri’s craft there can be no argument. Her ideas, however, can be somewhat more controversial. In her first two books, Lahiri comes down somewhat hard on white women, who she portrays as culturally ignorant homewreckers, interlopers in a complex and very tightly-wound world of transplanted desi culture. The protagonist of “Sexy” doesn’t know what the Gramin Bank is, thinks Bengali is a religion, and waltzes into an affair with a married Indian man. To be fair, she grows both a conscience and a complex sense of self as the story evolves, but the raw materials of which she is made feel less thought-out and more stereotyped than Lahiri’s other characters. The same is true of Max, the flippant upper class girlfriend of hero Gogol in The Namesake, who reads like she’s been ripped out of a Pottery Barn catalog and pasted into an otherwise beautiful book. Despite the faulty ingredients Lahiri puts in her white-woman characters, her portrayals of romantic relationships between western women and non-western men are almost painfully well-observed. Her general conclusion: there is no love big enough to stop the cross-cultural shoe from pinching. Trying to cram your foot into it is almost always a bad idea. I agree with her. Intercultural relationships are hard 100% of the time; 90% of the time they’re so hard that they’re not worth the sacrifices both partners must make.

Between these books and Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri joined the 10%: she married a white man and seems to have recanted of her rigid attitude toward white women. And developed a much more complex one toward arranged marriage. In Interpreter, the final and best story, “The Third and Final Continent”, tells of an arranged marriage that develops into tender regard and acceptance. Gogol’s parents in Namesake have a similarly warm relationship. In Unaccustomed Earth, arranged marriage is a source of anxiety and even an inkling of defeat. The heroine of the final three interlinked stories accepts an arranged marriage at the age of 37, after a prolonged affair that goes nowhere and another affair that promises nothing. Lahiri’s conclusions here are much less cheery: she seems to be mourning the fact that passion means nothing without commitment, and at the end of the day, commitment is so important that passion is an acceptable sacrifice. It seems old-fashioned but is in fact highly sophisticated: in an era when there is zero reward (socially, emotionally, financially) for growing up and taking on adult responsibilities, these are the kinds of choices people must make. The stories in Earth are fraught with anxiety and loss--the endings are ambiguous both morally and emotionally. But there is poetry here that is absent in her previous books: Lahiri is sad without being grim, and out of their disjointed lives her characters speak with frank honesty. The movement of God over the earth is more obvious here; she makes freer use of deus ex machina to send her characters in and out of one another’s lives. I’m not sure I like what Lahiri has given up to make room for this new maturity and willingness to explore the banal and the isolated--Namesake and Interpreter were fervent with unspoken joy, and I looked out at a brighter earth after reading them. This Unaccustomed Earth lives up to its name: in Lahiri’s eyes, we are all adrift upon it, never quite at home, and never quite able to leave home behind.

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Red Room

January 19

Recently, the witty and insightful Alexander Besher got in touch with me about contributing to Flowers Under the Sand, an anthology of fantasy and sci-fi by Middle Eastern and Muslim authors. As we were swapping emails, he mentioned he had a page at redroom.com, a new site whose goal is to bring a myriad of authors to the same digital space, creating the largest concentration of literary talent and discussion on the web. I checked it out, and they’re not kidding: Amy Tan, Salman Rushdie, Khaled Husseini, Ayelet Waldman and Maya Angelou are all blogging there. Yes, blogging. As I was browsing through the About page, I discovered the site is run by none other than Ivory Madison, my dear colleague in superherodom, with whom I share an editor at DC. (Her miniseries Huntress comes out later this year.) It’s a small world, or as I’ve increasingly found, all writers eventually meet all other writers.

Now I’ve got a page at Red Room too, which I’m excited about--I’ve never been two clicks away from the likes of Maya Angelou before. You can take a peek at it here. I’ll probably reserve that space to write about writing, an indulgence I don’t usually allow myself.

Back to work. The more I do, the more there is.

Love Letters

November 05

A couple of weeks ago I signed up for The Times Online’s series of love letters by famous writers/musicians. I did it on a whim, but finding sigh-inducing notes from the likes of Margaret Atwood in your inbox (inevitably I’d forget they were coming, so when they showed up they were a nice surprise) was such a pick-me-up that I’ve decided this should become an institution. Love letters from strangers. It’s a great idea.

They inspired me to dig up this piece, which I wrote while reading some of the Gnostic Gospels and thinking about apostolic love. I doubt it will end up in anything--it wasn’t inspired by and doesn’t relate to anything else I’m writing--so I’m putting it here for you-all. If you’ve got a blog, write a love letter of your own and post a link in the comments.

It goes on like a song born of words but not composed by them, echoing in my head: I have never for a moment stopped loving you. Foresight is only a superdeveloped ability to isolate probability sets; intuition unclouded by the irrational. I have moments of that kind of clarity—rare moments. If we can remember the past we can member the future. There came a point at which I knew you would ask me to do something that would cause you to despise me. I saw the exact shape that spite would take—you are the kind of person who can amputate an intimacy like a frostbitten limb, and I knew that when I fell in love with you. I knew a lot of things. I know less now.

From time to time I go back and read the letters I should not have kept. I don’t need to be reminded of why I carry you with me; the reasons are present enough in the tips of my fingers. No, I read to be closer to you—you inhabit your words perfectly, and though you do not love me now, you loved me once, and when I read what you wrote to me then you are as alive and present as you were when the sentences were fresh. You were a beautiful rage, preternaturally focused, as sharp as wind on a cloudless day in winter, a high noon of ice. I could only love you: I am predisposed to intoxication, and you are predisposed to intoxicate. But even for me, I who am always in love, I who fall in love with passerby on the street, you were particularly undeniable.

You were wrong to ask what you asked of me. You did and said things I thought were cruel, yes. You ran from things I thought you should have confronted, yes. But even in those moments I wanted only to comfort you—I told you as much, yet you sent me out among your enemies. And I went. I have always done what you’ve asked me to do. I knew as I left that we had failed each other: in sending me you had trivialized my love, and in going, I trivialized yours. My obedience was simply an unwillingness to stay when you didn’t want me—it was, in other words, pride. A humbler, stronger person might have resisted; stuck to your side and endured your anger. But I went, and you did not ask me to come back until it was too late. By then we had curdled into doubt, jealousy and suspicion. Anything we make now will be from mended parts. And so I read the letters I should not have kept, and remember.

But I love you. Now, here. Mended or not, remembered, membered, forgotten, I love you. I want to use the old cliché and say nothing else matters, but of course that’s not true. Lots of inconvenient things matter. They will not stop mattering because I’ve written this. Still, you should know that it’s 2AM and I’m awake with your ghost. A mere princely absence, but to me, precious.