THE HEWLETT-WOODMERE READERS:
A Monthly Afternoon Discussion Group
2008 – 2009
OUR NINTH SEASON OF GOOD
Mondays at 2 p.m.
Jan. 12: UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Discussion
Leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman
Author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, Ms. Lahiri returns to the topic of expatriate Bengali parents and their American-born raised children.
Feb. 9: THE THIRTEENTH
TALE: A NOVEL by Diane Setterfield
Discussion
Leader: Edna Ritzenberg
Vida Winter,
Mar. 16: LOVING FRANK by
Nancy Horan
Discussion
Leader: Ellen Getreu
Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney met when husband Edwin Cheney commissioned Mr. Wright to build a house for them. Their subsequent love affair wrecked both their marriages. Ms. Horan’s novel focuses not only on the love affair but on Mamah Cheney, a bright, intelligent woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century.
The New
York Times
April 4, 2008
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters
tend to be immigrants from
As she did in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories “Interpreter of Maladies” (1999) and her dazzling 2003 novel “The Namesake,” 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.
Many of the characters in these stories seem to be in relationships that are filled with silences and black holes. In some cases this is the result of an arranged marriage that’s never worked out; in others it is simply a case of people failing to communicate or failing to reach out, in time, for what they want.
In “Only Goodness” Sudha, who is working on her second master’s degree at the London School of Economics, wonders at the bizarre “lack of emotion” in her parents’ marriage, which was “neither happy nor unhappy” and seemingly devoid of both bitterness and ardor, but she finds her own marriage to an Englishman foundering upon her failure to tell him a family secret. In “Hell-Heaven” the narrator recounts the story of her parents’ chilly marriage and her mother’s passionate, unrequited love for a fellow Bengali and family friend, who gave her mother “the only pure happiness she ever felt.” And in “A Choice of Accommodations” Amit realizes that the “most profound thing” in his life — the birth of his daughters — has already happened, that the rest of his life will be only “a continuation of the things” he already knows. Increasingly he will come to regard solitude — a run in the park, a ride by himself on the subway — as “what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane.”
As for Ruma, the heroine of the title story, she realizes during a visit from her widowed father that they rarely talk about matters of real importance; they do not speak about her mother or her brother, they do not discuss her pregnancy or her marriage, or her father’s new relationship with a woman he met on vacation. This has been their history as long as she can remember: “Somehow, she feared that any difference of opinion would chip away at the already frail bond that existed between them.” Her marriage, Ruma realizes, is stilted too: she is increasingly aware that she and her husband, Adam, are “separate people leading separate lives,” and that part of her is actually relieved when Adam leaves on one of his many business trips.
Like many children of immigrants Ms. Lahiri’s characters are acutely aware of their parents’ expectations; that they get into an Ivy League school, go to med school or grad school, marry someone from a good Bengali family. Deftly explicating the emotional arithmetic of her characters’ families, Ms. Lahiri shows how some of these children learn to sidestep, even defy their parents’ wishes. But she also shows how haunted they remain by the burden of their families’ dreams and their awareness of their role in the generational process of Americanization.
Their parents often seem so exhausted just coping with the difficulties of surviving in a strange new world that talk about self-fulfillment or depression or happiness seems utterly irrelevant to them; they are strangely pragmatic and unsentimental — about their marriages, their work, the hardships of daily life. These characters’ American-born children are, at once, more romantic about the possibilities of finding genuine love and rewarding careers and more cynical too about the trajectories of most people’s lives. Often cast in the role of facilitator or fixer, they are accustomed to serving as their parents’ go-betweens and to easing their younger siblings’ way into full-fledged American lives.
Sudha, for instance, scavenged yard sales for the right toys for her little brother — “the Fisher Price barn, Tonka trucks, the Speak and Say that made animal sounds”; she read him books like “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and “Frog and Toad,” and “told her parents to set up sprinklers on the lawn for him to run through in the summer.”
The last three overlapping tales in this volume tell a single story
about a
Bengali-American girl and a Bengali-American boy, whose crisscrossing
lives
make up a poignant ballad of love and loss and death. Hema and Kaushik
get to
know each other as teenagers, when Kaushik’s family comes to stay with
Hema’s parents while they house-hunt in the
Hema, meanwhile, becomes a professor, a Latin scholar, who after a long, unhappy love affair impulsively decides to opt for a traditional arranged marriage; though she is conscious of the “deadness” of this proposed partnership, she tries to convince herself that the relationship will endow her life with a sense of certainty and direction. Then, against all odds, Hema and Kaushik run into each other in Rome — on the eve of Hema’s departure for her wedding — and embark on an intense, passionate affair. And yet it is an affair that concludes not with a fairy-tale happy ending but with an operatic denouement that speaks of missed opportunities and avoidable grief.
In the hands of a less talented writer it’s an ending that might have seemed melodramatic or contrived, but as rendered by Ms. Lahiri it possesses the elegiac and haunting power of tragedy — a testament to her emotional wisdom and consummate artistry as a writer.
April 6, 2008
American
Children
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri.
Quaint and antique, the cry for love
of
country that Sir Walter Scott made in his poem “The Lay of the Last
Minstrel” is something schoolchildren quit memorizing a century ago.
Its
stirring theme rouses a patriot’s yearning: “Breathes there the
man, with soul so dead, / Who never to
himself hath
said, / This is my own, my native land!”
It’s easy to forget, given the
sensitivities that have been awakened in this country since 9/11,
thrusting
lifelong citizens under suspicion for having foreign-sounding names and
subjecting visitors to the indignity of being fingerprinted, that
America was
conceived in a spirit of openness, as a land where people could build
new
identities, grounded in the present and the future, not the past. This
dream,
despite current fears, has in great part been made real. And the fact
that
America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent
itself
— accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind
the constrictions and comforts of distant customs — is the underlying
theme of Jhumpa Lahiri’s sensitive
new collection of stories, “Unaccustomed Earth.” Here, as in her
first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” and her novel,
“The Namesake,” Lahiri, who is of Bengali descent but was born in
London, raised in Rhode Island and today makes her home in Brooklyn,
shows that
the place to which you feel the strongest attachment isn’t necessarily
the country you’re tied to by blood or birth: it’s the place that
allows you to become yourself. This place, she quietly indicates, may
not lie
on any map.
The eight stories in this splendid
volume
expand upon Lahiri’s epigraph, a metaphysical passage from “The
Custom-House,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which
suggests that transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and
more
flourishing. Human fortunes may be improved,
As her characters mature in their new
environments, they carry with them the potential for upheaval.
Geography is no
guarantee of security. Lahiri shows that people may be felled at any
time by
swift jabs of chance, wherever they happen to live. Uncontrollable
events may
assail them — accidents of fate, health or
weather. More often, they suffer less dramatic reversals: failed love
affairs,
alcoholism, even simple passivity — the sort of troubles that seem
avoidable to everyone except the person who succumbs to them. Like
Laura, the
well-meaning narrator of “Brief Encounter,” the men and women of
Lahiri’s stories often find themselves overwhelmed by unexpected
passions. They share her refrain: “I didn’t think such violent
things could happen to ordinary people.” Again and again, the reader is
caught off-guard by the accesses of emotion and experience that waylay
Lahiri’s characters, despite their peregrinations, their precautions,
their concealments.
Each of the five stories in the
book’s
first section is self-contained. In “Hell-Heaven,” the assimilated
Bengali-American narrator considers how little thought she once gave to
her
mother’s sacrifices as she reconstructs the tormenting, unrequited
passion her young mother had for a graduate student during the
narrator’s
childhood. In “Only Goodness,” an older sister learns a sharp
lesson about the limits of her responsibility to a self-destructive
younger
brother. “A Choice of Accommodations” shows a shift in power
dynamics between a Bengali-American husband and his workaholic Anglo
wife
during a weekend away from their kids — at the wedding of the
husband’s prep-school crush. And the American graduate student at the
center of “Nobody’s Business” pines for his Bengali-American
roommate, a graduate-school dropout who entertains no romantic feelings
for
him, spurns the polite advances of “prospective grooms” from the
global Bengali singles circuit and considers herself engaged to a
selfish,
foul-tempered Egyptian historian.
In the title story, Ruma, a
Bengali-American
lawyer, repeats her mother’s life pattern when she gives up her job and
follows her husband to a distant city as they await the birth of their
second
child. “Growing up, her mother’s example — moving to a
foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children
and a
household — had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was
Ruma’s life now.” The nurturing force field of pregnancy shields
Ruma from the sting this reflection might be expected to provoke, but
it
doesn’t protect her widowed father. When he visits her in
Ruma is struck by how much her father
“resembled an American in his old age. With his gray hair and fair skin
he could have been practically from anywhere.” Seeing his daughter,
Ruma’s father has the opposite reaction: “She now resembled his
wife so strongly that he could not bear to look at her directly.”
Ruma’s
identity, Lahiri suggests, is affected less by her coordinates on the
globe
than by the internal indices of her will. She is a creature of the
American
soil, but she carries her own emotional bearings within her. What are
the real
possibilities for change attached to a move? Lahiri seems to ask. What
are the
limits?
While tending Ruma’s neglected
garden,
her father shows his grandson how to sow seeds. The boy digs holes, but
plants
Legos in them, along with a plastic dinosaur and a wooden block with a
star.
Emblems of the international, the prehistoric and the celestial, they
are
buried in one garden plot, auguries of an ideal future, a utopia that
could be
anywhere or nowhere. How can it grow?
Lahiri’s final three stories, grouped
together as “Hema and Kaushik,” explore the overlapping histories
of the title characters, a girl and boy from two Bengali immigrant
families,
set during significant moments of their lives. “Once in a Lifetime”
begins in 1974, the year Kaushik Choudhuri and his parents leave
Except for their names, “Hema and
Kaushik” could evoke any American’s ’70s childhood, any
American’s bittersweet acceptance of the compromises of adulthood. The
generational conflicts Lahiri depicts cut across national lines; the
waves of
admiration, competition and criticism that flow between the two
families could
occur between Smiths and Taylors in any suburban town; and the fight
for
connection and control between Hema and Kaushik — as children and as
adults — replays the tussle that has gone on ever since men and women
lived in caves.
Lahiri handles her characters without
leaving
any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she
were
accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her
narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature
videos of
different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking
through the
soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth.
Liesl Schillinger is a regular
contributor to
the Book Review.
San
Francisco Chronicle
Heller McAlpin
Sunday, April 6, 2008
It's early to be proclaiming a best book of the year, but Jhumpa Lahiri's gorgeous new collection of eight stories, "Unaccustomed Earth," will be hard to top. The book (and opening story) takes its title from a lovely quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne about the salubrious effects of sending "roots into unaccustomed earth" rather than replanting succeeding generations "in the same worn-out soil."
Although Lahiri continues to plow the fertile ground she first sowed in her Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, "Interpreter of Maladies" (2000) - Bengali immigrants and the culture gap that grows between them and their American-raised offspring - her characters repot themselves so frequently and her insights run so deep that there's little risk of exhausting this theme.
In "Unaccustomed Earth," the first-generation children who chafed under their parents' old-fashioned customs and vowed to marry for love are now adults, often wedded to or involved with non-Bengalis. They learn that contentment is more elusive than they thought. To their surprise, several find themselves drawn back to the security of their parents' traditional arrangements.
That's the common thread. What's uncommon is Lahiri's sensitivity as she tracks these characters' loves and losses with exquisite assurance. Several stories explore the pressures of family responsibilities - whether to a widowed father or a wayward younger brother - or the grief of losing a loved one. All unfold with a quiet accrual of details and nuanced observations that makes you regret having to leave its absorbing world when you finish. Yet each story is exactly the right length. Not only do these tales showcase Lahiri's gift for distilling lives into 25 to 50 pages, they also show why short stories are her form: She is a master of endings. Novels, such as Lahiri's "The Namesake," allow for expanded, continuous narration, but story collections provide more opportunities for the full stop that hits you squarely and continues to reverberate.
The three linked stories that make up the second part of
"Unaccustomed
Earth" offer a happy compromise between the long and short forms, and
some
of Lahiri's best writing. "Hema and Kaushik" features two only
children initially thrown together by their mothers' friendship. In
"Once
in a Lifetime," Hema, addressing an absent Kaushik, recalls the first
winter
of Kaushik's discontent: the month in 1981 when he and his parents
lived with
her family upon return to
In "Year's End," Kaushik picks up his story five years later. He's
a junior at Swarthmore, and his mother has been dead three years. He
describes
his first Christmas at home after his father marries a much younger,
more
traditional widow with two young daughters. Lahiri adroitly captures
his
simmering rage and lingering grief, infusing every line with his bleak
mood.
When he flees to
In the final story of the trio (and the book), "Going Ashore," the
two characters' paths cross briefly in
In the title story, Ruma, pregnant with her second child and newly relocated from Brooklyn to Seattle, struggles with relentless sadness over her mother's sudden death, even as she gradually recognizes her father's new lease on life. She feels "closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her." Yet "the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding."
These stories are often doleful and elegiac, but "Unaccustomed Earth" is cause for celebration: It showcases a considerable talent in full bloom. {sbox}
Heller McAlpin reviews books for The Chronicle, Newsday and other publications.
Interviews March 18, 2008
The author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake talks about her affinity for "plainness," why she avoids book reviews, and her new collection of short stories.
Next month marks the publication of Unaccustomed
Earth, a new story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri, the acclaimed
chronicler of
the Bengali-immigrant experience. Both of her previous books—Interpreter
of Maladies (a 2000 story collection that
earned her the Pulitzer Prize), and The Namesake,
a 2003 novel that later took shape as a
popular film— explored the cultural dissonances experienced by
immigrants
caught between the culture of their Indian birthplace and the
unfamiliar ways
of their adopted home. In Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of
eight
short stories, Lahiri continues to explore this theme, this time with a
focus
on the lives of second-generation immigrants who must navigate both the
traditional values of their immigrant parents and the mainstream
American
values of their peers.
Lahiri was born in
I spoke with her in their living room
on a
recent winter afternoon.
—Isaac
Chotiner
Your first, Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Interpreter of Maladies, was a collection of short stories. You followed it with a novel, The Namesake. And now your newest work is another collection of short stories. Why did you decide to return to the short story?
I never really decided it formally. It just happened to be the case that while I was finishing The Namesake I had a couple of story ideas on the back burner and then I just started writing them; I fell into them. Actually, a lot of these stories, to be honest, are very old story ideas that predate the writing of The Namesake. It's not that I was looking for something new.
Is the process of writing a short story different from the process of writing a novel? Do you approach the two differently?
I don't make a huge distinction in terms of what they require because I think an idea is either working or it isn't. And it can work—or not—at long or short or medium length. It depends on what the story I want to tell needs. I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for The Namesake, I felt that it had to be a novel—it couldn't work as a story. With this new book, as opposed to the first collection, I worked on many of the stories for years while they kept evolving and evolving and evolving. One difference is that in The Namesake each piece was contributing to a larger whole.
A lot of your stories are about exile—about people living far from home or moving to a new home. In your earlier work the focus was generally on Bengalis moving to America, but in Unaccustomed Earth it's often people moving to new places within America, or characters going to London, Italy, and all over the world. What is it about the idea of putting people in new physical circumstances that interests you?
It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation
and one
location to another for whatever the circumstances may be. In the first
collection, characters were all moving for more or less the same reason
(which
was also the reason my parents came to the
One thing that fascinates me about your previous stories is the way you view the marriages of people in your parents' generation. Your title story has that same theme, with a grown daughter coming to realize that her father is having a new relationship. Was that a fascination for you growing up: What is going on with my folks? And do you think it was especially interesting to you because you were growing up in a culture different from the one in which they grew up?
I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in
my
parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too,
because
there is an inevitable comparison. I do think it's a question that has
preoccupied me in all the books I've written. My parents had an
arranged
marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father
came and
had a life in the
In one of the stories in your new collection, "A Choice of Accommodations," the reader gets to view a marriage of people your age. We haven't gotten a glimpse like this of marriage when it comes to older generations.
In what way?
The story is explicitly about their marriage—you have them interacting alone, talking a lot, having sex, whereas the older marriages are viewed more from an outsider's perspective.
I am an outsider for that generation, but with this couple I could put myself into that character with greater ease. Though invented, I could imagine being married to that woman, having that particular chemistry and dynamic.
In terms of writers that you like—older writers—whom do you go back to time and again?
I've been reading a lot of 19th-century novels recently. I've always
loved
Chekhov and Tolstoy, but lately it's been Hardy. He's one of those
novelists
whose work I always go to. I will never get tired of those novels. The complete worlds that he creates—they are so focused
and
compelling. I don't think I know how to do that at all in my own
work,
but I find it inspiring. I really enter into something complete and
rich and
satisfying. There is a balance between the human drama and the world
around it,
and that interchange is so beautifully done. I also like learning
things in
those books—about the agricultural society, the hay, the farm—I
love that. And I like it more the older I get. That connection to the
land and
how rooted it is. I've also been reading
What about writers working today?
I read William Trevor, Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant obsessively
One critic who reviewed your first book said that your prose is extremely un-self-conscious and not showy. Without making a judgment on that, do you think he was correct?
I like it to be plain. It appeals to me more. There's form and there's function and I have never been a fan of just form. My husband and I always have this argument because we go shopping for furniture and he always looks at chairs that are spectacular and beautiful and unusual, and I never want to get a chair if it isn't comfortable. I don't want to sit around and have my language just be beautiful. If you read Nabokov, who I love, the language is beautiful but it also makes the story and is an integral part of the story. Even now in my own work, I just want to get it less—get it plainer. When I rework things I try to get it as simple as I can.
Do you have any desire to write a huge, panoramic novel?
I don't think so. I don't think I'm an effusive writer. My writing tends not to expand but to contract. If I do write more novels, I think they'll be more streamlined and concentrated.
That fits into what you were saying about your prose style, right?
Maybe. Yes. I don't like excess. When a
great
sweeping work is great, what makes it great is that there's no excess.
Do you write during a certain part of the day, especially now that you have kids?
It is hard with kids, and so I write whenever I have time to myself. It's getting more and more complicated, but on an ideal day there's time in the morning to work. If everything else can be kept at bay, I can make some time. I'm much more practical about it now.
Time and furniture, then—practical about both.
Exactly.
A lot of current novelists, from Zadie Smith to Martin Amis, also write criticism. Does that appeal to you?
Not so much. I don't like to judge. I don't feel comfortable doing that. But by saying that, I don't mean to judge people who do. A critic is an extremely valuable thing in art or literature or music, but I don't feel it's what I want to do. Before I wrote a book, I wrote some reviews and it was great fun. I'd get free books and write up a little something and I was into it. But then something changed. I think it was writing my own book. To be honest with you, and maybe this is shirking my duty in some way, I like to try and stay as disconnected as I can from the world of contemporary writing because I just think it's best for my writing. I want to be a little bit unplugged. If you're reviewing, you have to stay on top of what's coming out and what's going on, and put yourself into that discourse. It's a much more active and engaged position than I want.
Do you socialize with other writers?
Not a lot. I do have some close friends who are writers, so there are people in my life who I can turn to about things having to do with writing. But I don't really seek out other writers.
When your books come out, do you read reviews?
No—I haven't read a single review yet about this book! With each book it's been different. For instance, with the first book, it was so astonishing that it was happening that I read everything. It was like the first baby—you take a million pictures and each moment is so special. I read the good and the bad. It was intense and hard. After a point, I couldn't keep my equilibrium anymore. With The Namesake I tried to stay more aloof. For me it's about, How can a review help me to write something better? It's not about lots of praise, although no one wants the inverse of that. I feel like I should be more hardened at this point, but in a way I feel more vulnerable. With this book I decided not to look at anything at all. Perhaps in the future I'll ask my editor or someone to show me a few that she thinks could really benefit me somehow.
So when The New York Times comes in the morning, you never take a glance to see whether a review is in there?
[Laughs]. Actually, my husband gets the
paper on
Saturday morning and tosses out the book-review section so I don't see
it. He's
been doing that for a few weeks now. It's hard to live in
Given that you feel so protective of your own work, how did you feel about your book being made into a movie?
I enjoyed it very much, because I relinquished all control and I
felt a very
easy connection with the director, Mira Nair. I had seen her other work
and I
knew that she was smart and interesting. There was a sense of, This person has a vision, this person
knows what
she wants to say. It was an alternative universe and I conceived of
it as
something that was her thing. It was her Namesake.