Far From Brooklyn

I don’t want to be a book-reviewing bore.  The point of writing about books – at least for me – is not to recommend them or inveigh against them.  I’m more interested in the way that books weave themselves into your (my) life than in persuading you, my imaginary reader, to read them yourself.

(After all, if I had my druthers I’d come to every book as an utter mystery, with no idea about the subject matter, format, style, or author – the better to experience the work truly fresh.)

But more to the point, there’s not a lot of value in reviews of books that were published years or even decades ago.  Only occasionally do I crack open a new or newish book.  I’m more likely to be at least a few seasons behind the times, and more than likely the book has been reviewed dozens of times or more.   What can I add to that, and why would I want to?

So it’s hard to say what there is to say about “Unaccustomed Earth.”  It got wonderful reviews that to some extent were valid.  Lahiri writes believably about Bengali Americans and the complications of first and second generation immigrants. She’s an earnest, careful writer whose sentences just kind of lie on the page.  I mean, get a load of this one:

Guests were gathered under a beautiful tree where a bar had been set up, offering cocktails before the ceremony.

Really? A “beautiful” tree?  Not an elm that had somehow survived the blight?  Not a sugar maple?  Was it a hickory tree?  Or possibly it was not deciduous.  And how illuminating to learn that the bar was offering cocktails.  And it’s helpful to hear that this is happening before the ceremony, which the reader knows hasn’t happened yet but a little redundant info never hurt anyone, right?

This kind of lumpy, sloppy writing crops up fairly frequently in Lahiri’s writing, and I think the reason must be this: Because very little happens in her stories, she must fill the space left by plot with something.  This is not a short collection – 333 pages in the paperback edition I read – and most of the stories run very long, 40, 50, even 60 pages.  The first story, the title story, is a full 57 pages, the plot of which (no kidding) is this: A widowed father comes to visit grown daughter and her young son.  He wonders how to tell her he has a sort of girlfriend.  He stays for a bit.  Then he flies home.  The end.

Now, that snotty summary of the story purposely ignores the psychological shadings of the story, and some interior twists.  But in her apparent desire to remain “real,” Lahiri seems to resist even dramatic psychological shifts as plot devices (or reading aids!).  There are no piercing epiphanies in these stories.  After all, life is not really full of epiphanies, is it?

The best of these stories is the comparatively short, and awfully titled, “Hell Heaven,” and the longer, more complex “Nobody’s Business,” both of them about thwarted or failed love affairs, and inherently more dramatic than the others.

The second half of the book is a series of interrelated short stories that is fairly cleverly structured (clever but irritating until you understand the narrative device, which really doesn’t become clear until fairly well into the second of the three stories.)  It ends on a really tawdry, icky note that I won’t go into, and it features a man whose profession, it turns out, is a globe-trotting war/disaster photographer (novelists can’t seem to resist war photographers as protagonists, and with no disrespect to photographers and photography, let me simply say that I have known more than a few of the very few that there are at any given time in the world and believe me when I say they aren’t that interesting).

So all of this is an odd preamble for saying, in fact… that I liked this book.  It was well done.  It gave me some insight into the lives of Bengalis in America and despite the limited stories and the sometimes insipid writing, I did want to know what (if anything) would happen.  The affectless prose, the sympathy of the writer for her characters, and the repeated figures from story to story brought to mind Anne Tyler, a writer whose appeal mystifies me, and yet as I have said I do love much of her work.  Likewise I can imagine looking back 15 years from now and thinking, “Huh, I’ve actually read nine Jhumpa Lahiri books.”  She’s good, I’ll read more, but I’ll also hope for more – more drama, more muscular writing, more chances.