Word: lahiri
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Among the things you will not find in Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction are: humor, suspense, cleverness, profound observations about life, vocabulary above the 10th-grade level, footnotes and typographical experiments. It is debatable whether her keyboard even has an exclamation point...
...person, Lahiri is almost as reserved as she is on the page. She is tall and slender and stands very straight, with a silk scarf tied around her neck, much too elegant for the chain coffee shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she is being interviewed. Lahiri speaks quietly and deliberately, vouchsafing only the occasional smile. She orders nothing...
...Lahiri is the most critically praised member of America's rising literary generation. Born in London to Bengali parents, she grew up in Rhode Island, where her father was (and is) a librarian. She went to Barnard, then moved to Boston to work in a bookstore and collect master's degrees and generally figure herself out. "I sometimes wonder, If I'd not gone up to Boston for those years, would I have written fiction?" she says. "In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, Who am I to dare...
...success of Unaccustomed Earth is an anomalous data point, but it should tell us things about ourselves. Such as: we're way more interested in Bengali immigrants than we thought we were. Lahiri is a miniaturist, a microcosmologist, and she helps us understand what those lives mean without resorting to we-are-the-world multiculturalism. Everyone in Lahiri's fiction is pulled in at least six directions at once. Parents pull characters backward in time; children pull them forward. America pulls them west; India pulls them east. The need to marry pulls them outward; the need for solitude pulls them...
...Lahiri's rise is part of a changing of the guard in American fiction, from a generation in which white American-born men still play a primary role (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon) to one in which the principal voices weren't born here, like Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (Russia) and Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic). They're transnationals, writers for whom displacement and dual cultural citizenship aren't a temporary political accident but the status...