By Elyse Weingarten

Unaccustomed Earth is Jhumpa Lahiri’s third book, her follow up to 2003’s bestselling novel, The Namesake, and her second collection of short stories after 2000’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies. This collection of eight stories continues Lahiri’s investigation of the double consciousness of Bengalis in America, this time focusing on the relationships and generational divide between first-generation Bengali immigrants and their American-bred children. The stories in this collection, at times, skirt around the edge of melodrama, but narrowly avoid it, both because of Lahiri’s gifted sleigh of hand, but also because what emerges forcefully from these narratives is not so much plot, but a chorus of internal voices. Lahiri’s second generation American-Bengalis muse endlessly over their positions in life and the world that confounds them, unsure if it is their own decisions or fate that has landed them where they are.

While America has offered education, wealth and other opportunities, with its mythos of self-invention, it has also created a generation of adults, infantile in their knowledge of themselves and of how the negotiation of their heritage, the expectations of their parents, and their own American desires are to proceed. Somehow, the promised offspring remain more estranged in the promised land than their parents who really were strangers.

In the title story, Ruma, a young mother pregnant with her second child, moves from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Seattle, encountering a position surprisingly similar to that her recently deceased, expatriate mother did thirty-something years ago. The irony here is that Ruma, with a law degree and a corporate career, has choices her mother didn’t. It is an irony only her father, recently retired, notices. When he visits and she tells him that she plans to stay at home and not return to work, he simply asks her, “Will this make you happy?” Meanwhile, Ruma’s father has begun traveling around the world and has embarked on the first courtship of his life, with an Indian woman he met on a tour of Italy. He, too, since the death of his wife, has been encountering a cultural landscape that is as promising as it is messy. Despite having planned a romantic trip to Prague with this woman, he still refers to her as “Mrs. Bagchi,” and cannot bring himself to mail her a postcard. Of Mrs. Bagchi, he reflects, “A girlfriend? The word was unknown to him, impossible to express.”

In the second story, Hell-Heaven, a young woman recounts her mother’s secret passion for a family friend, Pranab Chakraborty, an engineering student at MIT and a Bengali from a wealthy family back in Calcutta, who in the early 70s, meets the woman as a young girl and her mother in Harvard Square. From that moment on, Pranab, becomes a part of the family, a regular fixture at their home, accompanying her mother and herself on exertions around the Boston area. The woman’s adult self looking back, remarks, “It is clear to me now that my mother was in love with him,” But, as anyone could have expected, Pranab falls in love and marries an American girl, and eventually stops coming around. Lahiri’s descriptions of adolescent rebellion, marital indifference, the difficulties of acculturation and the fear and loathing of the American bourgeoisie are exquisite here, although the true beauty of this tale lies in the complexity of the mother- daughter relationship. It is only when the woman, herself, is an adult, close to the age her mother was then, that she begins to understand and feel compassion for her mother as a woman, and is able to confront all that her little girl innocence was unable to see. The shocking revelation in the last line of the story erases all traces of sentimentality and petty rifts on cultural divide, reversing it into a tale of pathos that will, without a doubt, become a classic. Hell-Heaven is the best story in the collection.

The last three stories of the book, linked together under the heading “Hema and Kaushik,” read like a novella. In the first of the three stories, Once in A Lifetime, Kaushik’s family stays with Hema’s when returning to the United Sates, after several years in India. Hema, at thirteen, is forever marked by the presence of sixteen year old Kaushik in her house. As class differences become ostentatiously pronounced in such close quarters between the parents-- Hema’s middle class and Kaushik’s nouveau riche-- a bond between the two of them is formed that takes final shape in the third story, Going Ashore, when Hema and Kaushik meet again as adults in Rome. While the meeting of the adults Hema and Kaushick feels a bit contrived and staged, it feels so for only a moment as Lahiri enlivens her characters with such emotions and inner chaos that this meeting makes sense if only because they might be the only two in the world to actually understand each other. Likewise, the second-person tense used throughout Once in a Lifetime and in parts of Year’s End and Going Ashore, could easily feel cheap and annoying, if it didn’t feel so earned Lahiri’s characters, so taciturn, and unable to communicate, finally experience a well-deserved catharsis through these lengthy dialogues, that like everything else of beauty in this world, ends suddenly with silence and violence.

Few of us are lucky enough to experience happiness in this life is the leitmotif of Unaccustomed Earth. And again and again, through each story, Lahiri reminds us how even fewer of us know what happiness is.

Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
Alfred A. Knopf: 334pp., $25