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The New Global NomadsJhumpa Lahiri and the perils of assimilation.

By Ann Hulbert
Posted Thursday, April 3, 2008, at 1:12 PM ET
Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth.

The era of the global nomad seems to have arrived in the United States. Both leading presidential candidates—not just Barack Obama but John McCain, too—grew up shuttling between cultures and learning "to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places," as Obama's sister summed up the sunny cross-cultural credo of the campaign trail. Meanwhile, a pre-eminent chronicler of the hybrid consciousness has emerged as well: Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali-American who writes about darker transnational shadows. "Being a foreigner is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts," reflects the mother who has been transplanted from Calcutta to Cambridge, Mass., in Lahiri's novel, The Namesake (2003). The same character's husband can't escape an awareness of "all that was irrational, all that was inevitable about the world."

The legacy of growing up in the grip of a globally mobile heritage is once again Lahiri's theme in her third book, Unaccustomed Earth. In a collection of stories as limpid yet complex as her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), she returns to familiar terrain—most of her Indians are highly educated, upper-middle-class suburbanites on the Boston-New York corridor—and to her well-honed role. Lahiri is an unillusioned anatomist of the greatest immigrant success story in the United States. But this time, she has captured more clearly than ever before a restless feeling of uprootedness that is as representative of America now, in the post-9/11 era, as the credo of wide-eyed openness ever was.

Born in Britain in 1967, raised in Rhode Island, and regularly taken on long visits to India, Lahiri grew up feeling, she has written, "intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new." As dutifully high-achieving daughters (never mind immigrants) often do, she mostly felt she failed at both exacting tasks. And it seemed that nobody appreciated her plight. Her father and sari-clad mother, and the Bengali social circle that defined her home sphere, certainly didn't. Nor did her peers, parochially focused on their own American meritocratic dreams.

But Lahiri was right in step with a globalizing world. In the late 1990s, she veered off her ethnically correct academic track (B.A. from Barnard, M.A.s from Boston University in English and creative writing, followed by a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies) to embark on fiction about the enigma of Indian-American arrival. By then, accumulated brain drain and boundary crossings and intermarriage had made hyphenated heritages "part of this country's identity," as she put it. Lahiri was already probing the aspirational strains, the blend of professional drive and personal unease, when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Her subject—the barriers and fears that haunt even the well-off in a newly porous world—had become, in a way, the subject. And her Bengali background bequeathed her a perspective she's been developing ever since. What Lahiri never fails to miss is how the very wariness that isolates her Indians from their American neighbors, and divides custom-bound parents from their anxiously assimilating children, also inspires a common quest for a sense of kinship. In a time when borders—between genders and generations, not just nations—are more permeable than ever, no one can count on feeling fully at home in the world.

Assimilation, in Lahiri's fiction, is about coming to terms with disorientation. It is about not fitting in or settling down, not starting over from scratch and freely forging a new identity or destiny. Her characters balance precariously between two worlds—not just Asian and Western, but inner and outer, traditionally circumscribed and daringly improvised, unwilled and willed—and they do so not just transitionally, but permanently. In fact, The Namesake was animated by the counterintuitive insight that the second generation's sense of dislocation can be, in its way, harder to deal with than the full-fledged transplantation traumas of the foreign-born parent pioneers. In her new stories—which have grown longer—Lahiri pursues that theme. In various stages of setting up house, her mostly thirtysomething Bengali-Americans feel half-betrayed yet awed by their parents. Not that they ever let them know. Part of the burden they live with is unspoken ambivalence about elders who, against great odds, managed a feat that daunts their offspring. Well-aware of their own advantages—not least accent-free English and freedom from the old world custom of arranged marriage—these U.S.-born young adults still can't help feeling adrift.

Lahiri is a narrator subtly in tune with her poised yet highly sensitive characters. She sets store, as they do, by emotional reserve and a studious display of control—all the while alert, as they mostly are, to powerful tensions coiled beneath the surface. They are well-aware of profound gaps in perspective, yet where they have trouble bridging them, Lahiri excels at just that. In the title story, and in the three linked stories that close the collection, she maps the divergent angles of vision and emotion that obstruct, even as they broaden, her characters' search for a sense of belonging.

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