The dish

I am fighting my way through Pale Fire, which has been very disappointing (great concept, sluggish execution), which has kept me from sitting down to review Jhumpa Lahiri’s wonderful short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies.

The book, Lahiri’s debut, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. I’ve written before that I’ve had mixed success with the Pulitzer winners, although if we extend it to the award’s predecessor, the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, I’d say I’ve liked nine of the thirteen winners I’ve read. Interpreter makes it ten of fourteen.

The overarching theme – a popular one among literary critics now – is the cultural conflict faced by immigrants from the developing world to the United States. What makes Lahiri’s take different, at least to me, was her very specific focus: She eschews the Big Event, the Sudden Plot Twist, and the Grand Statement. Her stories are slices of life, sliced almost arbitrarily rather than crafted around endpoints that force the flow of the story from A to B. When she wants to tell the story of the effects of the Bangladeshi war of independence, she does so from the perspective of a young Indian girl in the U.S. whose family becomes close to a Bangladeshi man studying in the United States. His wife and daughters are in Bangladesh, and after the conflict breaks out, he loses contact with them. Another story, “Mrs. Sen’s,” explores the difficulty a 30-year-old Indian woman encounters with the transition to life in America through the eyes of the young American boy whom she babysits in the afternoons, using her problems learning to drive as a synecdoche for the larger issue of cultural transitions.

The two most powerful stories were the first and last in the book. The opener, “A Temporary Matter,” tells of a childless Indian couple whose marriage has slowly eroded into mutual indifference since the wife suffered a late-term miscarriage while the husband was away on a business trip. During scheduled hourlong blackouts in the evenings in their Boston neighborhood, they’re forced to spend more time together, but the results are small and simple, rather than big and dramatic, showing an impressive feel for human relations for an author in her early 20s. The final story, “The Third and Final Continent,” a young Indian man comes to Boston to study and rents an apartment from the very old and very eccentric Mrs. Croft, developing a faint affection for the woman despite her eccentricities. He moves out when his arranged bride comes over from India, but pays the woman a visit with his wife. Mrs. Croft’s response is absolutely priceless.

None of the stories strikes a truly false note, not a bad read on emotions, no clumsy dialogue, no judgments on the superiority of one culture or another. Even “This Blessed House,” about an Indian couple who buy a house, only to find tacky Christian artifacts stashed in corners and cupboards, avoids the easy way out of ridiculing the house’s (absent) previous owners and focuses instead on the way the wife’s reaction to the pieces alters her husband’s views of her. Unfortunately, Lahiri’s The Namesake doesn’t appear to have been a good showcase of her talents, based on the film version and on several of your comments, but Interpreter of Maladies is a very strong showcase of a young writer’s eye for the way people interact. Fortunately, Lahiri has returned to the short story format for her most recent book, Unaccustomed Earth, released in hardcover on April 1st.