asianamlitfans | A Review of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

A Review of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth

In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri returns to the genre began her illustrious literary career. She remains, of course, the only writer of Asian descent to have ever won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Lahiri clearly excels at the short story. The reason why she does is precisely because the narrative does not necessarily require the gravitas that a novel might. Instead, a short story, at least from my perspective, can be much more subtle and can exist in a mode of quiet tension. Lahiri has mastered what I would call the “turn” in the short story—the way in which the presupposition a reader might be forming is completely altered by the story’s conclusion. For instance, in the first short story, also called “Unaccustomed Earth,” the tension seems to coagulate around the visit a father (he lives on the East Coast) has with her daughter, Ruma, now married and living in Seattle, with her husband, Adam, and mixed race child, Akash. Ruma had given up a lucrative job in law after her mother’s death, which left her bereft of a kind of companionship she now half-dreads, half-desires with her father. The distance between the two is made palpable by the story’s central conflict, which seems to revolve around whether or not Ruma should allow her father to live with her and the family. The “turn” appears when the readers discover that all along the father never even wanted to stay for an extended period, nor had any desire to do so, even though it seemed he like would desire it. Indeed, he has already moved on to a new life, even having taken up a new lover, one acquired through his various travels he had been taking around the world as of late. The conclusion sees the father leave the house feeling burdened by the desire he feels daughter possesses for companionship; Ruma is the one feeling empty. In this respect, the short story subverts the oft-investigated paradigm of the “empty nest” syndrome experienced by the parental generation. Here, sentimentality for family resides in the daughter, rather than the father, who even after developing a strong tie with Ruma’s son and even constructs a garden in the yard, really does not want to remain connected to anything that resembles a nuclear family. The majority of these stories seem to operate with this turn in mind. The short story, “Nobody’s Business,” functions on the level of stripping the desire a man has for his Indian American roommate, Sang, completely away. At first, he seems to romanticize her life, picturing her as a beautiful, innocent lover, but it is clear by the end of the short story, that she can be extremely mean-spirited and ultimately egotistical. The conclusion thwarts our expectation that a romance is potentially in store, instead changing the romantic target into a quiet monster. The last three short stories, which are all linked, are perhaps the collection’s weakest, precisely because, as a longer set of stories, they require much more heft. Regardless of these small blips, the collection overall is amazing and elegaically stunning.