Books

Unaccustomed Earth
By Jhumpa Lahiri, Knopf, 2008, 352 pp.

Jhumpa Lahiri's characters in Unaccustomed Earth often refer to their jewelry — bangles, a ruby choker, emeralds, pearls. The stories themselves in this collection are rare as fine jewels, beautiful as a string of genuine pearls — each one its own perfectly wrought masterpiece, subtly layered, but all carefully knotted together, making a cohesive chain of related themes.

With the Pulitzer Prizes recently awarded, it is easy to recall that Lahiri is a Pulitzer recipient herself for her collection Interpreter of Maladies. This new set of eight long, fleshy stories is absorbing, profoundly affecting. The themes of family, shifting values and changing times, and of Indian-American immigrants trying to adapt to foreign soil weave their way through each story.

In the title story, a young mother who has recently moved across country watches her visiting widowed father interact with her small son, the two digging together in the back yard, planting flowers, vegetables and even a little plot of the child's toys.

The daughter and father do a slow dance with each other during the visit, gauging each other's expectations and limitations, hiding and sharing pertinent information and feelings.

In "A Choice of Accommodations," a married couple takes a weekend together, leaving their young daughters at home, to attend the wedding of an old friend of the husband's. The weekend at the hotel near his old prep school is an opportunity for them to savor some much-needed time alone, to take a small vacation from the heavy demands of their day-to-day lives.

But old memories and current frustrations intrude, knocking the idealistic plans off kilter. The beauty of the story itself is that it reflects all the vagaries and nuances of real, lived-in marriage — it bumps and weaves but maintains — or finally grasps — a thread of connection.

The final three linked stories are told from the points of view of a man and woman who have known each other since childhood. Kaushik and Hema are very small when their parents, immigrants from India and living in the Northeast, meet and connect.

Kaushik's family moves to India and back to Massachusetts over the course of 10 years or so. Hema's parents host Kaushik's until they find a house, and that is the extent of their converging paths until 20-plus years later when they happen to run into each other in Italy.

The stories cover acres of ground — in the first, Kaushik's mother dies young of breast cancer, the family striving to live as if she isn't really sick; in the second, the widowed father remarries in a quick arranged union in India, to stave off his loneliness.

The poignancy is palpable; the emotions mined in the stories are raw and completely familiar to any who have been in similar positions.

Lahiri captures so well Kaushik's resentment of the new, kindly younger wife, as she inhabits the space that was once his mother's. "When my father had tried to remove the signs of my mother from the house I blamed him for being excessive, but now I blamed him for not having done enough."

In the last story, when Kaushik's and Hema's paths converge for the last time, their shared history leads them to quickly fall in love. Their subsequent choices and ultimate fates are a stunning, unforgettable conclusion to a book of incomparable humanity, rooted in earth familiar to anyone, regardless of ethnicity.

Lahiri chooses to tell her stories through the lens of the lives of Indian-Americans, providing an interesting window into their particular experiences.

But she knows of the human soul's capacity for love — and equal capacity for sometimes dashing it — and writes poignantly of these universal traits. Her stories are real and grounded, substantive enough to savor slowly and appreciatively.