Unaccustomed Earth

Book nine of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2008 is Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. All of the stories deal with the sometimes precarious straddling of cultures, as the children of Bengali immigrants become Americanized and drift away from the traditions of their parents.

There are eight stories in the book. The first part contains five stories that have different characters, but return to the same theme. The title story, which opens the collection, is a touching depiction of a young Indian woman, married to a white man, who has relocated in Seattle. Her father, a widower, comes to visit. He busies himself tending to her neglected garden and bonding with his young grandson, all the while harboring a secret. "A Choice of Accommodations" is about another mixed marriage, as an Indian man returns to his boarding school to attend a wedding with his wife. "Only Goodness" chronicles the relationship between an older sister, the responsible one, and her younger brother, who struggles with alcoholism. The best of this part may be "Nobody's Business," which deals less with Indo-Americans than the others. A young woman moves into a house of grad students in Boston and her housemate, who has a crush on her, gets involved in her love life. It's the kind of story than sneaks up on you.

The second half is three inter-connected stories about Hema and Kaushik, two children of immigrants who meet as children and then reconnect for a brief love affair in Rome. I liked the second story, "Year's End," which has Kausik dealing with his widowed father's remarriage.

Lahiri's style is very precise and careful. There isn't a spare word in her prose; no flourishes or frills. I can't find fault with that, but when reading these stories in sequence, pretty much one a day, one can long for a little showing off. Also, each of these stories is roughly a different way of expressing the same frustrations of the assimilating, the tension between the generations. I almost longed for a story that broke the mold and took place on Mars or something. This is very good stuff, though.