Lahiri explores new directions in ‘Unaccustomed Earth’

“Unaccustomed Earth”

By Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf, 352 pages, $25)

In the long, absorbing “Unaccustomed Earth,” the title story of Jhumpa Lahiri’s extraordinary new collection, a woman named Ruma invites her recently widowed father for a visit to her home in Seattle.

Against her own desires, Ruma plans to ask her father to move in with her and her husband and young son. What she doesn’t realize, of course, is that her independent-minded father would much rather take advantage of the freedom his wife’s death now affords him.

For readers of Lahiri’s fiction, these are familiar themes: the alienation that Indian immigrant parents feel toward their American-reared children and the guilt those children feel as they assimilate into the melting pot of the United States.

But as she proved in her debut short-story collection, “Interpreter of Maladies” (1999), and her first novel, “The Namesake” (2003), Lahiri writes so compellingly about these conflicts and pays such careful attention to the most emotionally telling of details that each story feels freshly minted.

Take “Hell-Heaven,” the second story in the collection, about a woman’s lifelong infatuation with another man. It takes place, like so many of Lahiri’s stories, in Cambridge, Mass., where her Indian immigrant characters fled in the 1960s and ‘70s to attend graduate school at M.I.T. and Harvard.

It’s here that Pranab Charkraborty, a lonely bachelor studying engineering, meets a fellow Bengali family and ingratiates himself with them. The story is narrated by the family’s daughter, who never fully grasps – until much later in life – why her mother clings so tenaciously to Pranab and why she is so devastated when he decides to marry an American woman.

It’s a universal story of yearning and unrequited desire, rooted so specifically and powerfully in a sense of time and place that we feel as if we are living right alongside the characters, eating “the leftover curried mackerel and rice” or sharing in “a picnic of hard-boiled eggs and cucumber sandwiches.”

For all that’s comfortingly familiar about “Unaccustomed Earth,” though, one of its chief pleasures is that it shows Lahiri stretching in entirely new directions.

In “A Choice of Accommodations,” the author serves up a slice of Updike-ian Americana while managing to put her own distinct twist on the proceedings. It’s the tale of Amit, the son of Indian immigrants, and Megan, his American-born wife, who have come to the Berkshires from New York City to attend the wedding of one of Amit’s former flames.

With characteristic empathy, and less-characteristic satiric bite, Lahiri details the shifting fortunes of this unsteady union, as Megan struggles with a torn dress and Amit knocks back a few too many cocktails.

Even better is “Only Goodness,” arguably the strongest story in the collection. As she often does, Lahiri begins with an eloquently written, matter-of-fact sentence that only makes us want to learn more: “It was Sudha who’d introduced Rahul to alcohol, one weekend he came to visit her at Penn – to his first drink from a keg and then, the next morning in the dining hall, his first cup of coffee.”

Over the next 45 pages, she charts Rahul’s brutal struggles with addiction and recovery and the devastating effect it has on his family.

The first five stories are so varied and accomplished (another, titled “Nobody’s Business,” follows a man who tries to protect his roommate from an abusive relationship) that the second half of the volume is almost inevitably a bit of a disappointment.

Lahiri presents three connected works about Hema and Kaushik, who meet as teenagers in “Once in a Lifetime” but realize much later that they are soul mates.

Taken individually, these stories are gripping and affecting, although the third story in the triptych, “Going Ashore,” strains the limits of plausibility: first in the way it reunites Hema and Kaushik after many years, and later as it uses the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 as a cheap plot device.

But this is a minor flaw in an otherwise commanding and seamless volume. It’s like a symphony in eight movements – and there might not be a better book of fiction by an American writer published this year.