→ December 16, 2014
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The Lowland.

I wrote about the Yankees signing Chase Headley, the White Sox signing Melky Cabrera, and the various signings of Jed Lowrie, Alex Rios, Brett Anderson, and others for Insiders.

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Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999 for The Interpreter of Maladies, a scintillating collection of short stories that focused mostly on the experiences of Indian emigrants to the United States, beautifully crafted stories with empathetic characters and gorgeous prose. Her second collection of stories, 2008’s Unaccustomed Earth was just as impressive, but didn’t earn the same acclaim because it wasn’t her debut work and because in the interim, she only published one work, the 2003 novel The Namesake, a less well-received book turned into a mediocre film that starred Kal “Kumar” Penn in a serious role.

Lahiri’s second novel, The Lowland, came out late in 2013 and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the National Book Award, with stronger critical reviews than Namesake received as well. It’s a melancholy, introspective book of lives destroyed by the ripple effects across generations caused by one seemingly small choice made in the passion of youth. It features Lahiri’s evocative prose and strong characterization, but with the longer form available to her, she takes the opportunity to grab your heart with both hands and wring it out like a damp towel, yet without the critical or philosophical payoff I’d demand of a novel that delves so deeply into personal pain.

The lowland of the title is a swampy area near the Kolkata home of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who are as close as any two friends can be despite very different personalities. Subhash, the elder brother, is shy, cautious, scholarly, and eager to please; Udayan is more daring, outwardly emotional, and, ultimately, politically motivated. As the brothers come of age in the mid- to late 1960s, Udayan gets involved in local communist movements, eventually joining the real-life Marxist-Maoist movement known as the Naxalites, which still exists today primarily as a terrorist organization with only superficial political aims. While Subhash is studying marine biology in Rhode Island, the Naxalites’ activities turn deadly, after which Indian security forces arrest and kill Udayan, leaving his barely pregnant wife Gauri living with in-laws who can’t stand her and pushing Subhash to sacrifice himself to save her from a miserable future and raise his brother’s daughter. That choice has far-reaching and unexpected consequences for all three of them, covering the last two-thirds of the novel, during which we also receive more details on Udayan’s actions and his murder by way of explaining Gauri’s alienation and depression.

The resulting book covers four generations of this family, from Subhash’s traditional parents to his daughter (in all but the biological sense) Bela, who is nearly 40 at the end of the book and has a daughter of her own, with an especial focus on Subhash, Bela, and Gauri dealing with the holes left in their lives by Udayan’s death and in particular Gauri’s emotional withdrawal after it. I found it almost impossible to process Gauri’s lack of connection with Bela and eventual decision to leave her family to pursue an aimless academic career; that her sudden widowhood destroyed something in her is realistic, and Subhash would certainly never replace what she had lost, but for her to bear and raise Bela without forming an emotional bond or attachment just didn’t compute for me.

The ultimate problem with The Lowland its lack of any clear direction or point; it’s an engrossing, tragic story of people broken by history, carrying the fractures across an ocean and through generations, but what is Lahiri trying to get across? She is one of the preeminent writers of immigrant fiction, yet with her second novel, she has only added a good story without saying anything new about the experience of Indian-Americans coming here and returning home after the United States has changed them.

Next up: I’m nearly done with China Miéville’s Hugo Award-winning novel The City & The City.

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→ August 24, 2010
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Unaccustomed Earth.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, and her writing revolves around Bengali families in the United States who retain at least some of their non-American identity, but her writing is more American than most fiction by contemporary authors born in this country. Lahiri’s stories are richly textured, written in intelligent yet easy prose, showcasing her incredible skill at encapsulating human emotions through plot events large and small, and her overarching theme of Bengalis feeling adrift in a foreign country and culture seems central to the American experience regardless of the characters’ nation of origin. Her first published work, the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and if anything, her second story collection, 2008’s Unaccustomed Earth is even better, more assured with stronger characterization.

The title story, which leads off the collection, is one of the most subtle stories in the book, dealing with Ruma, an Indian mother married to a non-Indian man, whose widowed father comes to visit her in her new home in Seattle. She is still grieving from the sudden loss of her mother, and now must deal with the question of whether to invite her father to stay with her, per Indian (or perhaps Bengali) custom, even though she has never had a close relationship with him and believes her husband is less than thrilled with the idea of having his father-in-law living in their spacious house. Ruma’s father, meanwhile, has begun a quiet affair – so quiet it barely merits the term – with another Bengali woman, also widowed, and does not wish to reveal it to his daughter or to give up his peripatetic new lifestyle. Lahiri allows both characters to narrate the story, creating two distinct voices, moving the story along by magnifying tiny events in their lives during the father’s visit and establishment of a new relationship with his grandson, surpassing anything he ever developed with Ruma. The story’s conclusion is extremely un-Hollywood, yet more effective for its realism.

Unaccustomed Earth closes with a three-part novella titled “Hema and Kaushik,” which returns to the twin perspectives of the collection’s title story by tracking two young Bengalis through three stages of their lives – a brief period in their teen years when Hema’s family housed Kaushik’s on the latter’s return from India to Massachusetts; Kaushik’s difficulty in adjusting to a major change in his family situation while he’s in college; and an unlikely reunion between the two in Rome with the two in their late 30s. The novella is more about Kaushik (the boy) than Hema, with the latter serving more as a lens to examine Kaushik’s character, and how a few major events in his life shape his choices in adulthood, including his inability to grieve and his difficulties in forming lasting relationships with women.

As much as I may praise “Hema and Kaushik,” it wasn’t the star of this particular show. I don’t read many short stories because I often find it hard to get emotionally invested in a character or a plot in ten or twenty thousand words, but “Only Goodness” was easily the most affecting short story I’ve ever read, for personal reasons. The story opens by telling us that “It was Sudha who’d introduced Rahul to alcohol,” a clue to the guilt the sister would later carry for her brother’s alcoholism, even though the addiction and downward spiral was almost certainly inevitable. An uncle with whom I always felt close was a lifelong alcoholic, something I didn’t know until late in my teens, and his periods of recovery never lasted and were punctuated by disappointment and frustration on the part of the rest of his immediate family. I remember too well the phone calls I’d get from him at odd hours in the late 1990s, about some get-rich-quick scheme he’d found or a penny stock on which he wanted my opinion, and the fact that I was not equipped to handle him in those states, or even fully aware of what the calls truly signified. Eventually, I drifted out of contact with him, talking maybe once or twice a year, hearing of him through my parents, until the day in spring training of 2005 when I got another call that he had taken his own life the night before. Rahul lives to see the end of “Only Goodness,” but Lahiri paints an accurate portrait of the devastation a grown child’s alcohol problem can cause and the false hopes and crushing disappointments it can cause, while still giving the reader enough insight into Rahul to feel some empathy, until the climactic event that caps the story.

“A Choice of Accommodation” chronicles the gradual decline of a “mixed” marriage (between an Indian man and a non-Indian woman) by watching the couple over the course of a single day and night at someone else’s wedding; I’ve criticized many writers here for badly-written sex scenes that feel like they were written by teenaged boys, but Lahiri wrote one of the few I’ve ever read that didn’t make me cringe – perhaps it simply needed a woman’s pen – although as the conclusion to this story the device felt a little hackneyed. “Nobody’s Business” is actually told from the perspective of the shy American roommate of an Indian woman on whom he probably has a small crush; he finds out her mysterious boyfriend is having an affair and is left trying to decide whether and how to tell her about it. The story itself works, with a technologically quaint solution, but the constant parade of suitors that the girl, Sang, faces – all men seeking an arranged marriage through her parents – provided a level of exasperating comic relief. The weakest story for me – still above-average if you’re looking for grades – was “Heaven-Hell,” told by an Indian girl about her mother who, trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, develops a crush on a Bengali graduate student who rooms with the family for several months, and even thatt story features a classic Lahiri oh-by-the-way twist at its end.

Interpreter of Maladies was brilliant and worthy of the recognition it received, but I can’t say I was as moved or involved in its stories as I was in those of Unaccustomed Earth, and her ability to create tension in short stories that revolve around emotions rather than action is astounding, reminiscent of the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the novels of Marilynne Robinson, two of the best American writers of the last hundred years. And I think it’s fitting that someone of a non-traditional background should emerge as one of the brightest voices in 21st century American literature, one who speaks to the experiences of an entirely new wave of immigrants who spend much of their lives living in one country while trying to maintain the cultures and traditions of others.

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Before Unaccustomed Earth, I read John Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel, the first part of his U.S.A. trilogy. However, it’s not a complete, standalone novel; it weaves together the stories of five people in the U.S. in the late 1910s, but their paths just start to cross near the book’s end and nothing is resolved enough to merit a real review. I’ll write them up when I finish all three parts, which appear as a single entry on a few of the greatest-books lists I follow.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur.

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→ July 20, 2008
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Interpreter of Maladies.

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.

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→ March 11, 2008
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The Namesake (film).

The film version of The Namesake felt like a mediocre adaptation of a great book. I can’t speak to whether the book on which it’s based, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, is great, but the movie aspired to a scope that it wasn’t able to reach. It’s a quality movie, but one that left me feeling like it had missed its target.

The story … well, that’s the problem. The story lacks a coherent center. It is the story of a family, or perhaps the story of a culture clash, but either way it suffers without a central character to anchor the plot. The movie’s first half or first two-thirds or so focus on Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, the husband and wife and eventually the parents of Gogol Ganguli (the namesake of the film’s title), who takes over as the movie’s center through its finish. We start with Ashoke nearly dying in a train wreck in India, then we’re presented with the arrangement of his marriage to Ashima, and then they’re married and arrive in the U.S., where he’s lived for a few years since the accident. The movie settles in to a sweet sequence on the early years of the Gangulis’ marriage, then suddenly their two children are teenagers, at which point Gogol’s unusual name becomes a key plot element.

The movie jumps too quickly to achieve the epic scope of a novel that is attempting to tell the story of the clash between Indian and American cultures through the example of a single family. At one point, the scene changes and we see Ashima talking to a co-worker. She utters two sentences, around fifteen words. The scene ends, we’re taken somewhere else, and we never return to the previous point. This can work in a movie that’s trying to evoke a frenetic feeling in the audience, but a movie of deep emotions and big themes shouldn’t be rushing from one plot point to the next.

As another example, take the film’s last third, where Gogol wants to change his name, has a white girlfriend (the worst-drawn character in the film – about as three-dimensional as a piece of paper), then marries a Bengali girl in a 180-degree reversion to his roots, and then sees that marriage end in one of the less believable relationship-ending conversations you’ll see. (At the risk of spoiling something, let’s just say that Gogol must be telepathic to figure out his wife’s secret from the one verbal slip.) Gogol’s life alone, including his journey from assimilated American teen to proud son of Indian immigrants to one-foot-in-each-world yuppie to his uncertain future would fill a two-hour movie without any trouble. Squeezed into forty minutes, it feels cursory and unsatisfying.

I’m underselling the movie by focusing on this treatment of a rich plot. Ambition in a movie plot is a good thing, and the fact that they couldn’t fulfill the story’s promise is a minor criticism as opposed to the criticism I have of most movies, which is that their plots couldn’t fill a thimble to the halfway mark. The acting by all three of the leads in The Namesake is outstanding; Kal Penn’s performance will add yet another nail in the coffin that House is very slowly building itself, as I’ll have a hard time taking him seriously as a goofball. (Yes, I know he played Kumar, but that’s not exactly in my Netflix queue.) Some of the scenes shot in India are gorgeous; the costume design in the two Indian weddings is outstanding; and I thought the (almost) wordless scene between Gogol and his bride on their wedding night was really well done, a strong piece of writing that took its cue from how people actually interact with each other. The Namesake is absolutely worth renting; I’m just lamenting the movie it could have been instead.

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