Life > April 3, 2008

By Meg Smith | Staff writer

Jhumpa Lahiri’s praise of her favorite author, William Trevor, in a 2005 New York Times article easily encapsulates the quietly stunning quality of her own work. “His words are a balm, unadorned, precise, yet infused with melancholy,” she wrote.

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“I struggle to absorb the measured grace of his sentences, the quietly devastating emotional content of his work.”

The hotly anticipated Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri’s first work in five years, hit stores April 1.

The pressure and reader expectations are great for the author of The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake.

Each of her earlier works garnered great acclaim and numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Interpreter of Maladies.

The writer’s loyal fans will be pleased to know Unaccustomed Earth solidly bears up to its hype. Lahiri’s signature lucid, meticulous prose dazzles again in this collection of eight stories. As in earlier works, these stories explore the fraught attempts of first-generation Indian-Americans to negotiate human relationships, issues of identity, exile and death.

Somewhat more somber in tone than her earlier short stories, Lahiri’s characters feel an obscure but pervasive dislocation that transcends the immigration experience.

In the title story, “Unaccustomed Earth,” a recently widowed father visits his married daughter, Ruma, and young grandson in her new home in Seattle, tentatively building a new and closer relationship with them that is challenged by his need for independence.

The tale introduces the collection’s preoccupation with the tenuous nature of human relationships. The father contemplates his own relationship with his daughter.

“He wanted to shield her from the deterioration that inevitably took place in the course of a marriage, and from the conclusion he sometimes feared was true: that the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start,” Lahiri said.

It is a question at the heart of Lahiri’s collection.

The next selection, “Hell-Heaven,” in which a daughter witnesses her mother’s infatuation with a family friend following her dissatisfaction with a loveless marriage, pursues this theme, weighing the compensations life can provide with its failure to fulfill all of its promises.

As immigrants in Boston in the ‘70s, Usha and her family adopt a lonely Bengali college student as an unofficial relative.

Her mother’s unreturned love for him becomes “the one totally unanticipated pleasure in her life.”

The story delineates the family’s changing relations with great profundity and power.

“A Choice of Accommodations” follows a married couple’s vacation to a weekend wedding, their first trip in years without their two daughters, with the same depth of insight.

It poignantly examines the shifting dynamics of their marriage, the way the responsibilities of work and parenthood and disparate interests erode love, and the small, daily ways human beings fail each other.

“Only Goodness,” the story of an older sister’s struggles to deal with her brother’s alcoholism, is the only piece that feels less than perfect.

Despite a melodramatic tinge slightly reminiscent of a public service announcement, an anomaly for Lahiri, the story offers compelling relationships and mostly finely sketched characters. Ultimately, it succeeds in limning the writer’s favorite topic: the charged possibilities and dangers of relationships “as typical and as terrifying as any other(s).”

The trio of linked stories at the collection’s end are the collection’s best.

The family of a 16-year-old boy, Kaushik, come to stay with long-time family friends and their 13-year-old daughter, Hema, while they look for a house after moving back to Massachusetts from India.

Through her interactions with Kaushik and his family Hema is inducted into adulthood.

In the third story, Hema and Kaushik meet by chance in Rome 24 years later and begin an affair, drawn together by their shared history and sense of isolation from life’s significant moorings.

The austerely devastating conclusion elegantly demonstrates the necessity of venturing into the mess and disappointments of intimacy, the only potential for true substance in life.

Hauntingly resonant, Unaccustomed Earth re-affirms Jhumpa Lahiri’s status as one of the best writers today.

Objective yet tender, her work sensitively renders the full, rich complexities of existence with rare incandescence.