Unaccustomed Earth

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri has gotten a lot of critical acclaim, rightly deserved. I enjoyed her newest collection of short stories. They were exquisitely crafted, but mostly depressing. They weren't really about immigrations, but more about immigrants and the cultural disconnect that occurs between generations, as well as between those that leave their country (India, in this case) and those that remain.



She takes her title from a passage by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

However, it seemed to be that none of her characters really flourished in their unaccustomed earth, so I wondered about the title. A NYTimes reviewer theorizes that it isn't so much a statement as a question for Lahiri. "Is it true that transplanting strengthens the plant? Or can such experiments produce mixed outcomes?"

In the end, while the stories are beautifully written, I found them depressing. Maybe I'm too conditioned to want a happy ending. I think I would have been satisfied with just one happy ending, but there were none to be had.

In "Unaccustomed Earth", she tells the story of pregnant Bengali woman newly relocated with her husband to Seattle, whose father comes to visit. They are unable to communicate about the death of his wife and her mother. And he leaves without any resolution or increased emotional closeness.

"Only Goodness" is about a woman and alcoholic brother, and the havoc he wreaks in her life.

I had read some of the stories about Hema and Kaushik in the New Yorker earlier. This section consisted of three inter-related stories taking place over the course of 25 years. I had high hopes for a happy ending here, but instead, it was the most tragic. I had bad dreams all night after finishing these.

I like this description, from another NYTimes review:

Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters tend to be immigrants from India and their American-reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither: too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully. These Indian-born parents want the American Dream for their children — name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy house in the suburbs — but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land, and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but completely at home in neither; they always experience themselves as standing slightly apart, given more to melancholy observation than wholehearted participation.