The
Space Between Us: Unaccustomed Earth
By
Breanne Boland May 15,
2008 Issue
Generally, short stories aren’t my thing. I think it’s
because they often seem like a compromise, something people write
when a novel is too much - to sell to literary journals, for instance.
Or, as is more my experience, to workshop in college writing classes.
Either way, they frequently feel like a shortcut, rather than
a form that authors willingly work with.
This is not true of the work of Jhumpa Lahiri. Her first book,
the Pulitzer-winning Interpreter of Maladies, was a short-story
collection. She’s since published a novel (The Namesake,
which was adapted into a film), but with Unaccustomed Earth, she’s
returned to shorter pieces. It’s lucky for us that she has,
because her combination of thorough characterization and brief
views into the lives of others make short stories a natural medium
for her.
With Unaccustomed Earth, she’s working in her usual milieu,
concocting melancholy and vividly sketched stories of Indian immigrants
in America. Her couples and families straddle the crevasse between
India’s traditions and America’s friendly, forced
modernity, trying to honor their past while being fully open to
the future. At the same time, her elegant prose sketches the divides
between people, often between family members, meaning that any
reader can relate to the characters she creates and the stories
she tells - even if they don’t happen to have a gaggle of
Bengali relatives.
The book is split into two parts. Part one contains five unrelated
stories, although it isn’t difficult to imagine her characters
inhabiting the same world, or possibly running into each other
at the grocery store. The title story explores a father and daughter’s
different methods and pacing for getting over the death of the
family’s wife and mother; their differences become clear
when he visits her and her young son at their new house in the
Pacific Northwest. “Hell-Heaven” details the platonic
friendship of a man and a woman, and the complications that can
come from a culture that includes arranged marriages between strangers,
particularly when those marriages take place in a culture without
such arrangements. In “Only Goodness,” a family is
fractured by the twin sins of overachievement and addiction; the
eldest daughter learns that her own success can’t fix the
problems the rest of her family tries to ignore.
The second part is a series of three linked stories called “Hema
and Kaushik”. The title characters are distant acquaintances
that cross paths twice - once in late childhood and once in adulthood.
Each time they meet, one is on the cusp of a major life change.
As children of Indian immigrants in scientific fields, their lives
have many parallels, which initially divides them. Both characters
end up living abroad, and ultimately their shared histories seem
more exotic to each other than any new and unexplored path.
Lahiri is fairly young for having attained so much success, but
her writing radiates infinite assurance and polish. Her characters
can have the deepest neuroses or the most rigid cultural limitations,
but each one makes so much sense that their motivations might
as well have been laid out in a flowchart. She has a keen eye
for what separates people, but her gift is that she can see things
from all points of view. Her open mind turns what could be quaint
cultural observations into universal narratives.
Unaccustomed Earth, 333 pages, Alfred A. Knopf. Available at bookstores,
libraries, and online booksellers.
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