Identity, Culture, and New Beginnings: A Review of Unaccustomed Earth

This is a book of longish short stories about the Bengali American experience. Each story involves a Bengali family or individual who has immigrated to America.

This is Jhumpa Lahiri’s third book about Bengali Indians in America – the first was Interpreter of Maladies (a book of short stories), and the second was The Namesake, a full-length novel. I didn’t like either of these books, so my expectations of Unaccustomed Earth were quite low.

One would think that she was done with the Indian American experience. I mean, what could she have more to say? Turns out quite a lot.

This book has eight longish short stories:

• Unaccustomed Earth is a story about a married woman’s uncomfortable relationship with her father after her mother dies.
• Hell-Heaven is about a married woman in an arranged marriage who has a crush on another man.
• A Choice of Accommodation is about a mixed-marriage couple rediscovering romance on a getaway.
• Only Goodness is about a woman who introduces her brother to alcohol and then guiltily realizes that she may have helped him on the road to alcoholism.
• Nobody’s Business is about a young woman in a doomed romance observed by her sympathetic male American housemate.

The next three stories form a trilogy with the same characters appearing in all 3 stories, each drawing on events in the previous story. The protagonists are Hema and Kaushik, who meet as children in Once in a Lifetime. Their parents are friends who, with time, realize they don’t have much in common at all. The next story, Year’s End, deals with Kaushik struggling after his mother’s death and unable to accept his new stepmother and her children. This leads him on a path as a wanderer. In the last story, Going Ashore, Hema and Kaushik meet as adults and have a passionate affair. Will they make their lives together? Or is this another episode in both of their lives?

The title is from a quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne that is worth repeating, and, I think, conveys the book’s theme very effectively.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

Unaccustomed Earth Review

Many criticisms can be leveled against this book. It draws on too narrow a sub-section of people—Bengali Americans who are highly educated and almost fully integrated into the American way of life. None of the stories are very uplifting, and nothing much happens in some of them.

Despite these drawbacks, I love the book, mainly because of the lovely writing. It’s understated and yet lush and dreamy at the same time. Short stories are not my favorite genre, but these stories are pretty long, allowing Jhumpa Lahiri to take her time setting up the characters and the story. I loved this old-fashioned, almost Victorian way of story-telling.

All the short stories are uniformly good. The only exception for me was A Choice of Accommodation, which was a non-story, with nothing happening. The final trilogy of Hema and Kaushik is mind-blowing, and I just couldn’t guess which direction this story would go.

Terrific stuff. One beautiful reading experience. Jhumpa Lahiri has redeemed herself in my eyes with this book.