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Entanglements of identity

Jhumpa Lahiri sprang into print, with her 1999 short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies, her voice already assured and accomplished, a master of subtlety. For this, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award, among other honors.

By Jhumpa Lahiri

Alfred A. Knopf. 333 pp. $25

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Reviewed by Karen Heller

Jhumpa Lahiri sprang into print, with her 1999 short-story collection

Interpreter of Maladies

, her voice already assured and accomplished, a master of subtlety. For this, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award, among other honors.

Her novel The Namesake followed, garnering more praise, an accomplished movie by Mira Nair, and an increased following. Now she has published Unaccustomed Earth, five short stories and an exquisite novella, consisting of three interrelated stories. The verdict is clear. Born in London and raised in the United States, Lahiri is a writer of luminous prose and indelible stories of Indian immigrants, usually highly educated Bengalis, trying to find a place and some peace in a country unlike home.

The title of the collection and of its opening story come from Nathaniel Hawthorne: "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 wornout 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."

Lahiri's enduring subject is the notion of identity, especially as generations within a family try to attach to or untangle from those roots in the soil.

In the title story, a newly widowed grandfather happily bonds with his grandson in a Seattle garden while keeping his daughter at bay about a fresh romance with an old friend. He doesn't want to disappoint, nor is he inclined to share, which makes the revelation all the more shattering for his once-independent child who craves caring for him. As in all of Lahiri's stories, what isn't said is as vital as what is, the distances between characters as much a measure of a relationship as so much chatter.

In "A Choice of Accommodations," Amit takes his wife Megan to the wedding of his first crush. It's at the New England boarding school where Pam's father served as headmaster and which Amit attended as the only Indian student while his parents remained in Delhi. "And though Megan hadn't protested, he understood that on some level he had dragged her here, to an unfamiliar place full of unfamiliar people, to a piece of his past that had nothing to do with the life he and Megan shared."

But there is also this: "Megan's ordinary background had displeased his parents, as had the fact that she was five years older than he was. Her stark prettiness, her refusal to wear contact lenses, her height, had not charmed them. The fact that she was a doctor did not make up for it. If anything, it made their disappointment in Amit worse."

The hotel is dreadful, the view obstructed, and his wife has an unseemly hole in her dress and almost begs off attending, which Amit initially suspects as subterfuge to miss the event. Still, it is Amit who ends up drinking too much early in the evening and falling asleep, missing the frivolity, the sunrise, as though he was back at school all over again.

Unaccustomed Earth's second part, subtitled "Hema and Kaushik," initially appears more traditional; yet, in Lahiri's hands, it becomes transcendent, following two childhood acquaintances into young adulthood as their lives veer apart, only to be joined again.

"Once in a Lifetime" is told in Hema's voice, written almost as though it were an unmailed letter, addressed directly to the older and aloof Kaushik, whose family stays at her home after moving from Mumbai back to Cambridge, Mass. The use of "you," Hema's near-clinical observations of the teenage Kaushik - a figure worthy of such study - sets him up as the man he is to become, accomplished, dashing and unencumbered by lasting bonds.

Kaushik narrates "Year's End" as a senior at Swarthmore. Hema is nowhere to be found. The story helps establish the reasons for Kaushik's detachment, his father's constant peregrinations, the secrets and jolting announcements.

Finally, in "Going Ashore," the reader's hopes are met. Hema and Kaushik, never quite friends, become something more in adulthood, in part through shared loss of people and relationships no longer there. When Lahiri is so bold as to use a recent historical moment as the novella's denouement, it seems not contrived but astonishing, and the last paragraph, its final line, are as soaring as anything she has written.

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Jhumpa Lahiri will read from Unaccustomed Earth(ital) at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., at 8 p.m. April 24. General admission is $14; student tickets are $7. For tickets and information, 215-686-5322 or

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