Relationships ahoy

It’s one of those freakishly hot summer days but Jhumpa Lahiri is keeping her cool. The New York Times Bestseller list is not without it’s controversies, but few authors would object to their new book debuting at the top spot as Lahiri’s new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, did.

“Oh, it was just for one week,” Lahiri says modestly. “It was a freak of nature.”
Lahiri, passing through Dublin on a whistlestop publicity tour, notes that interest in the book has been far greater than expected. Perhaps that’s because the short story is an art form Irish writers excel at, she suggests.
“The Dubliners is one of the books that made me want to be a writer. It was one of the central experiences in my life as a reader. I read it as a student and then re-read it when I was older as a writer. It’s unbelievable; it’s such a revelation. One of the more contemporary writers I admire is William Trevor. He’s just one of the greatest short story writers.”
Born in London, and raised in Rhode Island, New England, Lahiri’s short stories chronicle the Indian – particularly, Bengali – immigrant experience. Like her previous books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Interpreter Of Maladies and The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth explores the dissonances and distances between the ethnic and adopted cultures of her protagonists. This theme of cultural distance is carried over into motifs of physical distance and emotional distance between people.
“I don’t think I did that on purpose, but it does seem to be a preoccupation of mine, not only in this book, but from book to book. I guess I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what separates people, both physically and figuratively or emotionally – what separates members of a family, or a couple in a marital relationship.”
In Unaccustomed Earth Lahiri’s preoccupation with physical distance is not just between India and America, a recurring theme in her previous work, but between cities across America’s vast continent, and between America and Europe.
“As I get older I’m becoming more interested in that, as a person, and as a writer – families, and those moments when we are separated from each other, or from a place. So many of my characters have a sense of separation, or their parents do and they are aware of that.”
This sense of separation permeates family relationships. Unaccustomed Earth pays particular attention to the tensions that arise out of family life and the distances between people in supposedly close relationships. Here the stories focus on second-generation immigrants and Lahiri’s characters, often in “mixed” marriages, tread a difficult path between the values of their parents and the values of their spouses, peers and friends.
Besides the cultural and generational clashes, Lahiri also examines the nuances and annoyances that make up so much of family life.
“In this book I think I was really concentrating on families and what a family is intended to be – you know, a man, a woman, a coupling that then creates children. It’s such an ideal, but ends up being a very complex and imperfect thing.”
It’s this complexity beneath the idealised and sanitised surfaces of relationships that Lahiri finds fascinating. In ‘Choice Of Accommodation’, married father of two Amit confesses to Felicia, a woman engaged to be married, that after the birth of their second child his marriage ‘sort of – disappeared’ and that he supposes that this happens in every marriage, sooner or later. Felicia, unable to digest this honesty, tells Amit that this is an awful thing to say, ‘at a wedding, of all places’.
“I’m interested in the reality of the situation. As a writer I’m asking, what is this life we are leading? In that story, the character is reckoning with those very natural shifts that occur in a long-term relationship. I didn’t want to write about a couple that’s falling apart, or getting a divorce or having an affair – I didn’t want the stakes to be so obvious and so high.”
Instead, Lahiri prefers to concentrate on the everyday nuances and difficulties.
“I’m curious about the more subtle crises a marriage weathers over time and what it takes to go the distance with someone. That with a relationship you gain something, but you also lose something. You gain a shared history with a person and perhaps children, but you lose that first blush. You know, ideally – oh there’s that word, ideal – there is no ideal. But what does it mean to be married to someone for a long time? Marriage is messy, it is complicated, and there’s no way around that.”
In many of the stories the characters deal with these everyday tensions and an optimistic view of family and marital relationships gives way in light of experience. Characters approach crisis points – a father and daughter cannot connect, alcohol destroys the relationship between a brother and sister, a married couple weather a crisis – but there is still a sense of hope permeating the edges of the stories.
“Relationships fall apart, and I wonder sometimes if the reason is that some people don’t want to face those moments and don’t have the stamina to get through to the other side. It can’t all be wine and roses.”