More Library Books

Just so my 3.5 readers understand that there's more to me than just detailing my angst about leaving Brooklyn, moving to Red Sock Country, and being pregnant with the Bean, let's have another book review.

Perhaps this will be the start of a semi-regular series. Friday books. This is until it gets too hot for me to read, of course.

Yesterday I finished Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth. Unlike the book before this, the novel The Namesake, I found it very satisfying. I think Lahiri is a much better short story writer than novelist. For me, the novel fell apart on page 200 (I think it was about 350 pages) because I found the parents in the first part of the book much more compelling and believable. On page 200 when the main character leaves home/his parents I found him to be flat and somewhat cliche in his relationships with American women.

The stories in Unaccustomed Earth deal with the same themes Lahiri writes about in The Namesake and her first and excellent story collection Interpreter of Maladies: the Bengali experience in America, most likely in suburbaney-urban places like Seattle and Cambridge and Philadelphia. In this way there's something comforting about reading Lahiri's stories because you feel like you already know these people. But it also seems like Lahiri is stretching her characters too--rather than mostly dealing with the Indian/Cambridge divide, the characters in the new book deal with sibling alcoholism, parent death, remarriage, secret illness, class/assimilation issues, isolation in suburbia, empty but consuming relationships. The last three stories are connected in a satisfying way--Lahiri naturally seems like a novella-ist. Her stories are long but not quite long enough for the novel so the three connected stories seem like a good bridge to this.

Lahiri is a classic, very writerly (I know writerly is a terrible word to use but I can't think of another) writer. Her sentences aren't cool like Richard Price or cute but have a strong sense of old-school narrative. She writes real stories about real people with real problems that feel set in real time.

Michiko Kakutani put it a lot more elegantly in her April 4th review:

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.

I think it's the "Chekhovian sense of loss blows" is why Kakutani writes for the Times and I just write in my kitchen.