Summer Reading #1: Jhumpa Lahiri, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

This one has been on my to-read list forever because I read THE NAMESAKE, really liked it, read INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, also liked it, then saw the adaptation of THE NAMESAKE and really liked that too. So when I didn't really get into the first story I thought, "Whoa, differences," and set the book down for a week or two while I was reading other things. I'm glad I went back to it, not least because I have to return it to the person from whom I borrowed it.

As in her previous books Lahiri writes in her milieu of immigrant Indian families and the second generation adjusting to adulthood in what is usually the upper-middle-class Northeast. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but UNACCUSTOMED EARTH largely dwells there like the others while dropping little insights that have nothing to do with being of that particular population. I found myself nodding to "Nobody's Business," the story of a Cambridge grad student who becomes almost unwittingly involved in the romantic life of his housemate, for the way it juxtaposes the specificity of his situation (falling in love the same year he is desperately trying to pass his oral exams on the second attempt) with the odd situations created by having housemates whose lives peek out in odd ways. Close to that in terms of my favorites was the sibling relationship and gulf of disappointment described in "Only Goodness."

The first and title story "Unaccustomed Earth" is very finely tuned -- the story of an older man who goes to visit his daughter and her family in Seattle soon after her mother has died -- but it didn't contain that little turn which I was looking for, the small moment of surprise or epiphany which I was looking for. I'm not saying that every short story must have it, but even though it's pretty long for the form, this story never surprised me, and I wished it would.

More Jhumpa Lahiri

• The new issue of Granta, a magazine I should be reading, has an interview, Interview-style, between her and one of her favorite writers, Mavis Gallant (whom I know primarily from her story "When We Were Nearly Young" once published [subscribers only] in the "New Yorker").
• Here's an NPR piece featuring her from last Thanksgiving about what it means to be American.
• And here's three reasons you should read Lahiri from a blog whose title I salute, Great Books By Writers Who Aren't Dead Yet.