Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Barnes & Noble Review

Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer who knows her strengths. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, her novel The Namesake, and this collection, Unaccustomed Earth, she has taken what would seem a narrow slice of the immigrant narrative and sent it sprawling. The characters that populate Lahiri's fiction tend to be of a type; more often than not, they are second-generation Indian immigrants, the children of middle-class Bengalis striving to remake themselves as middle-class Americans. Unaccustomed Earth is, in this sense, not a departure. Its eight stories find Lahiri retreading this familiar ground yet also staking out new territory -- the difficult landscape of American adulthood.

Lahiri's particular brand of prose, at once rich in detail and strikingly economical, plays best to the formal requirements of the short story. The Namesake, while impressive for a first novel, has a meandering quality, as if its author were unsure of how to maintain the momentum of her characters' lives over a full spread of pages. Her stories, by contrast, are commanding; Lahiri knows how to exploit the seemingly infinite resonance of a well-chosen image carefully placed. In the story "Hell-Heaven," the crushing collapse of a platonic romance happens, as it were, offstage. The narrator, a young Bengali girl who watches her mother fall in love with a family friend, remarks the following when he asks her parents for their approval of his chosen bride, a white woman: "My mother nodded her assent, but the following day I saw the teacup Pranab Kaku had used all this time as an ashtray in the kitchen garbage can, in pieces, and three Band-Aids taped to my mother's hand." This teacup, which had earlier signaled Pranab Kaku's assimilation into the family, comes back to quietly mark its fracturing.

"Hell-Heaven" is just one instance of how Lahiri, with Unaccustomed Earth, has harnessed her talent for the elegiac. Her stories are threaded together by a current of loss -- of lovers, of parents, of home. In particular, the three interlinked stories that finish the collection draw the atmospherics of absence to the fore. Hema and Kaushik, the title characters of this trilogy, move into and out of each other's lives, their presences lingering long after they have parted ways. Lahiri's interest in the elegy is more than a passing mood, and in these three stories she invokes its tradition of direction address quite deliberately. "I had seen you before too many times to count, but a farewell that my family threw for yours, at our house in Inman Square, is when I begin to recall your presence in my life," Hema opens the story "Once in a Lifetime." That a separation and a beginning are inextricable becomes a reality neither Hema nor Kaushik will ever quite shake. Just as the death of his mother and his father's remarriage launch Kaushik into an itinerant adulthood, so too the end of an affair becomes the hinge that forces Hema to begin anew.

As in the case of the teacup, there are no histrionics. Lahiri's narratives tend to be situational rather than specifically plot driven, the tension more likely to emerge from the wordless spaces between people than from any singular event. The stories of Unaccustomed Earth are, on average, considerably longer than those of Interpreter of Maladies, and Lahiri seems to find her ideal rhythm in the structural liberties of the long short story. She avoids both explicit dramatic pivots and the sagging weight of a full back-story -- the essential details must make their own case. It is when she tries to build her stories from a more conspicuous premise that she falters. "Only Goodness," the collection's single weak link, finds Lahiri falling into the trap of exposition. The very skeleton of the story feels didactic -- the perfect immigrant child reeling in guilt over her younger brother's alcoholism. "I can't fix him. I can't fix what's wrong with this family," Sudha proclaims, the dialogue unable to resist the tropes of teenage melodrama.

More often, in these rare instances that Lahiri allows her stories to explode, they do so with all the force gathered over their restrained build-up. In "Nobody's Business," another standout, a graduate student's brooding fixation with his female roommate, Sang, finally bursts into a physical confrontation with her unfaithful boyfriend: "It was easy for Paul to pin Farouk to the ground, to dig his fingers into his shoulders. Paul squeezed them tightly, through the thick wool of the sweater, feeling the give of the tendons, aware that Farouk was no longer resisting. For a moment, Paul lay on top of him fully, subduing him like a lover," Lahiri writes. This is her genius -- she waits patiently for her stories to run their natural course. Here, all of Paul's longing for Sang, all of his loneliness and sexual desperation, find unlikely release in a violent, almost sensual encounter with her boyfriend.

Like so many of the characters in Unaccustomed Earth, Paul exists in the grips of stasis. Where Lahiri's earlier stories dwelt, more often than not, on men and women starting out in the world, her new work turns its attention to people slightly further along in life, catching them at the moment where their lives -- romantic, professional, emotional -- are beginning to plateau. Most affectingly, the title story finds Ruma, a 30-something woman who has left her job at a law firm to raise her young son, adjusting to life in a new city and mourning the death of her mother: "By allowing her to leave her job, splurging on a beautiful house, agreeing to have a second baby, [her husband] was doing everything in his power to make Ruma happy. But nothing was making her happy; recently, in the course of conversation, he'd pointed that out, too." The story is an artist's rendering of a case study in depression. Similarly Amit, in "A Choice of Accommodations," has somehow found himself carrying out the unremitting patterns of domesticity alone, raising his two daughters while his wife toils under the medical resident's inhuman schedule.

If this sounds dismal, it isn't. Unaccustomed Earth may dwell in the experiences of paralysis and loss, but Lahiri's prose also lends itself to the rhythms of awakening. Her broken, multi-clausal sentences catch her subjects in the throes of realization. For instance, here is Ruma, blaming her husband for the fact that both his parents are still alive: "It was wrong of her, she knew, and yet an awareness had set in, that she and Adam were separate people leading separate lives." Through Ruma, Lahiri has given voice to the sentiment -- neither positive or negative, simply true -- that cements her collection. Perhaps, in the end, these stories are not sadder, only wiser. --Amelia Atlas

Amelia Atlas's reviews have appeared in the New York Sun, 02138, and the Harvard Book Review.

From the Publisher

These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers, Unaccustomed Earth exquisitely renders the most intricate workings of the heart and mind.

The Washington Post - Lily Tuck

The eight stories in this collection revolve less around the dislocation Lahiri's earlier Bengali characters encountered in America and more around the assimilation experienced by their children—children who, while conscious of and self-conscious about their parents' old-world habits, vigorously reject them in favor of American lifestyles and partners. Lahiri, who was raised and educated in the United States and whose parents are Bengali, is adept at showing us these cultural and generational conflicts. The stories she generates from these clashes appear true to life, and while a few lack nuance and at times feel familiar, they are never predictable. Lahiri is far too accomplished and empathic a writer to relax her gaze; she excels at uncovering character and choosing detail.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

As she did in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and her dazzling 2003 novel The Namesake, Ms. 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 Ms. 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.

The New York Times Book Review - Liesl Schillinger

…the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself—accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs—is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri's sensitive new collection of stories…Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth.

Publishers Weekly

The gulf that separates expatriate Bengali parents from their American-raised children-and that separates the children from India-remains Lahiri's subject for this follow-up to Interpreter of Maladiesand The Namesake. In this set of eight stories, the results are again stunning. In the title story, Brooklyn-to-Seattle transplant Ruma frets about a presumed obligation to bring her widower father into her home, a stressful decision taken out of her hands by his unexpected independence. The alcoholism of Rahul is described by his elder sister, Sudha; her disappointment and bewilderment pack a particularly powerful punch. And in the loosely linked trio of stories closing the collection, the lives of Hema and Kaushik intersect over the years, first in 1974 when she is six and he is nine; then a few years later when, at 13, she swoons at the now-handsome 16-year-old teen's reappearance; and again in Italy, when she is a 37-year-old academic about to enter an arranged marriage, and he is a 40-year-old photojournalist. An inchoate grief for mothers lost at different stages of life enters many tales and, as the book progresses, takes on enormous resonance. Lahiri's stories of exile, identity, disappointment and maturation evince a spare and subtle mastery that has few contemporary equals. (Apr.)

John Hiett - Library Journal

All eight of the longish stories in Lahiri's third book deal with various male/female relationships-father/daughter, husband/wife, brother/sister, roommates, step-family, childhood friends-in the context of the immigrant experience. Specifically, Lahiri examines the gulf between first- and second-generation Bengali immigrants-the expectations, often unmet, about, for instance, dress, achievement, and marriage. Lahiri's strengths are her characterizations and knack for universalizing the particular. The last three stories feature characters who meet as children, when Hema's parents share their house with Kaushik's family. Kaushik finds himself sharing more than just his house when, after his mother's death (a recurring theme), his father remarries a woman with two younger daughters. Sarita Choudhury and Ajay Naidu alternate reading the female and male voices, with accents waxing and waning as the story demands. Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 collection The Namesake. Unaccustomed Earth earned a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and debuted at the top of the best sellers list, making it a no-brainer for all library collections.

Library Journal

Four years after the release of her best-selling novel, The Namesake , the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lahiri returns with her highly anticipated second collection of short stories exploring the inevitable tension brought on by family life. The title story, for example, takes on a young mother nervously hosting her widowed father, who is visiting between trips he takes with a lover he has kept secret from his family. What could have easily been a melodramatic soap opera is instead a meticulously crafted piece that accurately depicts the intricacies of the father-daughter relationship. In a departure from her first book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies , Lahiri divides this book into two parts, devoting the second half of the book to "Hema and Kaushik," three stories that together tell the story of a young man and woman who meet as children and, by chance, reunite years later halfway around the world. The author's ability to flesh out completely even minor characters in every story, and especially in this trio of stories, is what will keep readers invested in the work until its heartbreaking conclusion. Recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/07.]-Sybil Kollappallil, Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Lahiri (The Namesake, 2003, etc.) extends her mastery of the short-story format in a collection that has a novel's thematic cohesion, narrative momentum and depth of character. The London-born, American-raised author of Indian descent returns with some of her most compelling fiction to date. Each of these eight stories, most on the longish side, a few previously published in magazines, concerns the assimilation of Bengali characters into American society. The parents feel a tension between the culture they've left behind (though to which they frequently return) and the adopted homeland where they always feel at least a little foreign. Their offspring, who are generally the protagonists of these stories, are typically more Americanized, adopting a value system that would scandalize their parents, who are usually oblivious to the college lives their sons and daughters lead. Ambition and accomplishment are givens in these families, where it's understood that nothing less than attending a top-flight school and entering an honored profession (medicine, law, academics) will satisfy. The stunning title story presents something of a role reversal, as a Bengali daughter and her American husband must come to terms with the secrets harbored by her father. The story expresses as much about love, loss and the family ties that stretch across continents and generations through what it doesn't say, and through what is left unaddressed by the characters. Even "Only Goodness," the most heavy-handed piece in the collection, which concerns a character's guilt over her brother's alcoholism, sustains the reader's interest until the last page. The final three stories trace the lives of two characters, Hema andKaushik, from their teen years through their 30s, when fate (or chance) reunites them. An eye for detail, ear for dialogue and command of family dynamics distinguish this uncommonly rich collection. Agent: Eric Simonoff/Janklow & Nesbit

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Reading Group Guide

1. Discuss the relevance of the epigraph from Hawthorne's "The Custom-House" not just to the title story but also to the collection as a whole. In which stories do the children successfully "strike their roots into unaccustomed earth"? Why do others find themselves unable to establish roots? How do their feelings of restlessness and insecurity stem from growing up in two cultures? What other more universal problems do they experience? In what ways does their lack of attachment to a place or culture reflect a more general trend in society?

2. In "Unaccustomed Earth," what underlies the tension in the relationship between Ruma and her father as the story opens? What aspects of the family's history inhibit their ability to communicate with each other? How do their memories of Ruma's mother and the life she led influence the paths they choose for the next stages in their lives? Do you feel more sympathy for either character's point of view?

3. In what ways does "Hell-Heaven" echo the themes explored in "Unaccustomed Earth"? How does the way the story unfolds add to its power and its poignancy? What parallels are there between the narrator's mother's "crush" on Pranab and her own infatuation with him and Deborah?

4. What is the significance of the title "A Choice of Accommodations"? What does it imply about Amit and Megan's marriage? Why do you think Lahiri chose to set the story at Amit's old prep school? Do you think the events of the weekend bring Amit a better sense of who he is, what he wants and needs from Megan, and his role as a husband and father? Will the weekend change anything for Amit and Megan andtheir relationship?

5. "Only Goodness" traces the impact of parental expectations on a sister and brother. Why did Sudha and Rahul develop in such different ways? Discuss such factors as the circumstances surrounding their births and earliest years; the obligations Sudha takes on both as the "perfect daughter" and in response to the combination of love, envy, and resentment Rahul's attitudes and behavior arouse in her; and the siblings' awareness of and reactions to the "perplexing fact of [their] parents' marriage" [p. 137]. Compare and contrast the siblings' choice of partners. What attracts Sudha to Roger, and Rahul to Elena?

6. Why does Paul, the American graduate student in "Nobody's Business," find his roommate, Sang, the recipient of frequent marriage proposals, so intriguing? Does Paul really want to help Sang, or does he get involved in her relationship with Farouk for more selfish reasons? Why do you think Lahiri titled this story "Nobody's Business"—and what does the title mean to you?

7. In "Once in a Lifetime," Hema addresses Kaushik directly as she recalls the time they spent together as teenagers. How does this twist on the first-person narration change your experience as a reader? Does it establish a greater intimacy between you and the narrator? Does it have an effect on the flow of the narrative? On the way Hema presents her memories? Is it comparable, for example, to reading a private letter or diary? Are the same things true of Kaushik's narrative in "Year's End"?

8. In an interview with Bookforum, Lahiri, whose parents immigrated to London and then to the United States, said, "My parents befriended people simply for the fact that they were like them on the surface; they were Bengali, and that made their circle incredibly vast. There is this de facto assumption that they're going to get along, and often that cultural glue holds them, but there were also these vast differences. My own circle of friends is much more homogenous, because most of my friends went to college—Ivy League or some other fine institution—and vote a certain way." How is this mirrored by the friendship between the two sets of parents in "Once in a Lifetime," who are close friends despite the differences in their backgrounds? Why does this attachment deteriorate when the Choudhuri family returns from India? Which of their habits or attitudes do Hema's parents find particularly reprehensible and why? What is the significance of Kaushik's breaking his family's silence and telling Hema about his mother's illness?

9. How would you describe the tone and style of Kaushik's account of his father's remarriage in "Year's End"? Does his conversation with his father [pp. 253-255] reveal similarities between them? Why does Kaushik say, "I didn't know which was worse-the idea of my father remarrying for love, or of his actively seeking out a stranger for companionship" [p. 255]? Does the time he spends with his father's new family offer an alternate, more complex, explanation for his father's decision?

10. What role do his stepsisters play in Kaushik's willingness to accept his father's marriage? Why is he so outraged by their fascination with the pictures of his mother? He later reflects, "in their silence they continued both to protect and to punish me" [p. 293]. In what ways does their silence and the reasons for it mirror Kaushik's own behavior, both here and in "Once in a Lifetime"?

11. How do "Once in a Lifetime" and "Year's End" set the stage for "Going Ashore," the final story in the trilogy? What traces of their younger selves are visible in both Hema and Kaushik? In what ways do the paths they've chosen reflect or oppose the journeys their parents made as immigrants?

12. Why does Hema find the idea of an arranged marriage appealing? How has her affair with Julian affected her ideas about romantic love? What does her description of her relationship with Navin [pp. 296-298] reveal about what she thinks she wants and needs in a relationship? What role do her memories of her parents' marriage play in her vision of married life?

13. What motivates Kaushik's decision to become a photojournalist? In what ways does the peripatetic life of a photojournalist suit his idea of himself? In addition to the many moves his family made, what other experiences make him grow up to be an outsider, "away from the private detritus of life" [p. 309]?

14. What does the reunion in Rome reveal about the ties that bind Hema and Kaushik despite their many years of separation? What does it illustrate about their attempts to escape from the past and their parents' way of life? What do they come to realize about themselves and the plans they have made as the intimacy between them escalates? Why does Lahiri introduce Hema's voice as the narrator of the final pages?

15. In what ways does "Going Ashore" bring together the themes threaded through the earlier stories? What does the ending demonstrate about realities of trying to find a home in the world?

16. The stories in Unaccustomed Earth offer a moving, highly original perspective on the clash between family and cultural traditions and the search for individual identity. How does the sense of displacement felt by the older, immigrant generation affect their American-born children? What accommodations do the children make to their parents' way of life? In trying to fit in with their American friends, do they sacrifice their connections to their heritage? In what ways are the challenges they face more complex than those of their parents?

17. Several stories feature marriages between an Indian-American and an American-and in once case, English-spouse. What characteristics do these mixed marriages share? In what ways does becoming parents themselves bring up (or renew) questions about cultural identity? What emotions arise as they contemplate the differences between the families they're creating and those in which they grew up?

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