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books: Reading between the lines.

The New Global NomadsJhumpa Lahiri and the perils of assimilation.

By Ann Hulbert
Posted Thursday, April 3, 2008, at 1:12 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

In "Unaccustomed Earth," 38-year-old Ruma, with a 3-year-old in tow and another baby on the way, has recently moved from Brooklyn to suburban Seattle, where her husband, Adam, takes a new job that has him on the road a lot. It's a classic American scenario, to which Lahiri adds a twist by having Ruma's father pay a visit, alone; Ruma's mother died suddenly the year before. Father and daughter, together and apart, are embarking uneasily on new stages of life untethered by a woman whose traditionalism had cramped yet also anchored them in different ways. Lahiri shifts throughout between Ruma's and her father's points of view, and between oblique Bengali generational strains and the more familiar affluent American family fault lines they can't help resembling.

The father, who unbeknownst to his daughter has met a Bengali widow on one of the European tours he has started taking, worries that Ruma risks being marooned in Seattle. He's haunted by echoes of his wife's predicament decades before: "Like his wife, Ruma was now alone in this new place, overwhelmed, without friends, caring for a young child, all of it reminding him, too much, of the early years of his marriage, years for which his wife had never forgiven him. He had always assumed Ruma's life would be different." So, of course, had Ruma, a busy lawyer until recently. But she finds herself peculiarly unmoored without the mother whom she had vowed not to take as her model. Ruma had also assumed that, balking at Bengali custom, she would never want her parents to come live with her. So, she is surprised to end up hoping her father will move in. And she is bereft to discover what he, like the secretly autonomous adolescent she once was, doesn't dare admit to her: that, far from feeling stranded, he has moved on to forge a new connection.

In her inspired concluding section—three stand-alone stories, with separate titles, grouped together as "Hema and Kaushik"—Lahiri again has younger Bengali-Americans unexpectedly pulled back into the old ways, only to find that the bonds they forge, unlike the ties their elders submitted to, don't rescue them. As she has before, Lahiri plays with an updated variation on an arranged marriage, intrigued by the notion that perhaps chance can steer us more happily than choice seems to. Kaushik and Hema, thrown together briefly as teenagers by their parents' tenuous friendship in suburban Boston, each narrate a story that prepares us for a much later, and brief, reunion. Their stories prepare subliminally for a rupture as well. Both unfold in the last, omnisciently narrated story.

The trio is a tour de force, embodying in its structure and voices Lahiri's core themes. Outsiders at heart—Kaushik has become a roving photojournalist, and Hema has only lately broken off a long-term affair with a married man—the two characters reach back to probe a sense of homelessness, addressing their stories directly to each other. Here, at last, is a tie that feels foreordained, rooted in a shared past of family connection, reminiscent in that sense of their parents' arranged marriages. Yet Hema and Kaushik are restless American romantics, born in the wrong place and time to have the fatalistic courage of their elders, who trusted that a shared future would truly yoke them.

As Lahiri steps in to thwart their convergence, she is as alert to "all that is irrational as well as inevitable about the world" as the father in The Namesake was. In her fiction, learning "to not build walls around ourselves" doesn't begin to cover the challenges that await her characters. They are wanderers navigating elusive borders, bumping up against barriers and testing ties, uneasily wondering if they will hold or not. That doesn't prevent Lahiri—or Hema and Kaushik, or plenty of others in these impressive stories—from finding "kinship and beauty in unexpected places." But it inspires a perpetual vigilance and an awareness that, even as the globe shrinks, vast distances will never disappear.

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