Getting Right Her ABCD

The stories in Unaccustomed Earth are divided into two parts: the first contains five stories, including the title one, and the second contains three, revolving around the same two protagonists, Hema and Kaushik. There is no story that is not carefully wrought and thoughtfully shaped: stylistically and, to some extent, thematically, they recommence exactly where Lahiri left off in her award-winning debut collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies. They feature professional, often academic, middle class, mostly Bengali families or individuals in suburban or campus US, and are often depicted from the perspective of children or adults who have grown up outside India. Their strength lies in depicting, with loving care, the everyday details, the hopes and disappointments, the pull and tug of circumstances and emotions that shape the contours of life, as experienced by people from such backgrounds.

The title story, Unaccustomed Earth, for instance, is about a retired Bengali father, recently widowed, visiting his daughter, now a mother herself, across the breadth of America. The daughter has yet to cope with her mother’s death and the responsibility she feels for her father now; the father has to send a postcard to a (Bengali) woman he is having a sedate, autumnal relationship with, a relationship he does not want to disclose. The story manages to honed perfection the tension between love and distance in such a situation. Other stories have a similar balance.

The second part of the book contains three interlinked stories of loss and love, each giving us aspects of the relationship, or lack of it, between Hema and Kaushik, children of two very different Bengali families thrown together, on and off across the years, by the accident of immigration. These three stories, taken together, along with a story, Nobody’s Business, from the first part, were the strongest part of the book for me, though there is nothing in this collection that is not worth reading.

One cannot fault Lahiri for the fiction she writes. Actually, one cannot think of a better example of this type of fiction, and it is undoubtedly excellent writing of its kind. But as a kind of fiction, the kind that is privileged today, it is finally limited by the assumed transparency of its narration, an excessive ease of representation, a feeling of knowing all in heaven and earth. In literature like this, unlike in life, there are too few ghosts and murders—and certainly no Hamlet.

The narratives in Unaccustomed Earth mostly tell the reader everything that needs to be told. Even the first-person narrator appears to be, often, fully aware of her own emotions and reactions. For instance, when a young girl is told by a boy that the boy’s mother, for some time a flamboyant guest of the girl’s parents, is actually dying of cancer, this is how the girl explains her own tears: "Perhaps you believed that I was crying for you, or for your mother, but I was not. I was too young, that day, to feel sorrow or sympathy. I felt only the enormous fear of having a dying woman in our home.... I was furious that you had told me, and that you had not told me, feeling at once burdened and betrayed, hating you all over again."

This is powerful writing, but it depends on an excess of visibility, of transparency, of self-perception or understanding of the world, an excess that runs contrary to the experience of life in general. The fault is not Lahiri’s; it is predicated upon currently successful writing by some dominant critical standards and related assumptions about the world. However, to my mind, when Lahiri resists this tendency, as in Nobody’s Business or in parts of the second section of the book, she comes closer to realising her full, and certainly significant, talent.