Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

Lahiri's voice is still. Rising and falling with a quietly confident cadence that I sometimes imagine her native Bengali must sound like. An educated guess at best. To my knowledge I have never heard Bengali :-p

Lahiri does not write action. Hers are the quiet walks on stormy uninviting beaches, long aimless drives through small town america and extended dinners Indian families excel in (where the silence is so profound you can detect who is eating what from the different timbre in the chewing sounds).With her latest book, Lahiri returns to her strongest form - the short story. A structure first seen in her Pulitzer prize winning first novel - Interpreter of Maladies.

At the beginning there are 5 stories. Each contained within itself. I could say a pearl within an oyster but the stories are not pearls or gems or any other pseudo-metaphor. They are interesting and a little bit strange but only strange in their mundaneness.
Plot? Dramatic contrivances? Exposition? What is that?

A story is what happens when we sit around waiting for our stories to begin. Its called life. And so we have them- a widowed Father spends some time with his pregnant married daughter's family in between the holiday tours he has made his life's purpose after his wife's death, a young couple befriend a lonely university student in a foreign land, yet another young couple attend a weekend wedding together, a ne'er-do-well brother visits his sister's new family, a young Indian lady shares accommodations.

Lahiri allows us to be voyeurs - peeking into people's lives for a moment or two and then sending us on our way. Her accomplishment is singular in making us care for these people, flawed and often unlikeable. In the brief moment we meet them, we wish them well. After all, they are our brothers and sister, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, sometimes they are Us.
Her final three stories are actually one story seen from the perspectives of 2 people. It purports to be a love story of karmic proportions, though the usual trappings of a love story are largely absent. There is no Happily Ever After. There is no sense of resolution or affirmation of our faith in love.
And yet at the end of the story, when I closed the book, I could only say to myself - This is a True Thing.