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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