Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri (2008) Published by Alfred A Knopf. 333 pages.

Reviewers of this book of short stories all seem to agree in praising Jhumpa Lahiri for her meticulous detail. To me the painstaking detail sometimes comes across as cold and angular, which is good insofar as it reflects the cold and angular thinking of many of the characters in the book. This is a cast made up largely of successful professionals: biochemists, cardiac physicians, freelance photographers, scholars of Tuscan history. But among these affluent characters there’s no sense of the sort of frivolous, jaded high living that you’d expect from, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald. A grim mindset pervades the book, that of people who come from a culture of Bengali immigrants that prizes ambition and achievement.
The most emotionally moving of these stories was Only Goodness, in which a promising young man, Rahul, succumbs to alcoholism while his loving sister begins to surpass him in achieving the sorts of successes he seemed destined for. The internal conflict faced by Rahul’s elder sister, Sudha, is genuine and worth studying—she has a sincere, childlike interest in helping him along, getting him past the worst of his addiction; and yet she also has a stake in his failure, because it’s made room for her.
Sometimes Lampiri goes too far out of her way to bring her plots to a resolution, as in the story Nobody’s Business, where the character Paul is secretly in love with his roommate Sang. Paul is a student of literature, unready for love, living too much in his head even to imagine how he might court the lovely Sang. But his constant attention to her do allow him to figure out that Sang’s boyfriend is a no-good two-timer. The reason the story doesn’t work, though, is that the boyfriend, Farouk, is such an obvious sleazeball that the story inspires pity rather than sympathy for the characters—pity for Sang that she’s so thick not to notice, and pity for Paul for going to such great lengths to prove what’s already more or less out in the open.
The stories Heaven-Hell and A Choice of Accommodations work the best of all the stories. Heaven-Hell is told from the point of view of a girl who witnesses her mother’s unrequited love for a young bachelor who needs help adapting to America. And A Choice of Accomodations is about a man who’s planned career as a doctor never worked out, and now he’s afraid that the passion in his marriage will fizzle in the same way.
The Bengali institution of arranged marriage weaves its way through the book, and comes to symbolize the systematic life that each of the families in the stories has to push aside, each in their own way. They’re entering a culture—(not American culture so much as a modern, globalized one)—that offers more freedom on the surface. But in Lampiri’s stories the freedom of choice itself seems like a demanding, unfamiliar and often hostile taskmaster to these characters who, while unflaggingly intelligent, seem to have a hard time getting to know themselves.