Books

I've read lately that Jhumpa Lahiri gets tired of interviewers asking if she ever plans to write about people other than the Bengali-Americans who have populated her three books: the Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection Interpreter of Maladies, the novel The Namesake and her glorious new story collection, Unaccustomed Earth.

Two words you should memorize in response to those queries, Jhumpa: "Shut up." Or, more politely: "Move on."

After all, did William Faulkner get criticized for sticking almost entirely to the citizens of (fictitious) Yoknapatawpha County, Miss.? Well, perhaps he did. And I'm pretty certain what he would have told those critics: "Shut up."

Ms. Lahiri's focus on the people she knows best has served her well, and serves readers even better.

Like Faulkner, Ms. Lahiri sticks to a certain culture and setting (in her case, mostly Boston-area Massachusetts), but the themes, emotions and human needs fueling her books are unconditionally universal.

In her focus on separation from the familiar, the comfortable and the beloved, she's really writing about most Americans. How odd is it, for instance, to meet a native Dallasite who's lived here all his life? It hardly ever happens – we continually separate and connect, separate and connect.

Ms. Lahiri's older generation of characters, so thrilled at first to come to America from Calcutta, go back time and again, sometimes permanently. They love the comforts and blessings of America, yes, but the yearning for home overcomes them.

The author obviously believes that the occasional uprooting has benefits. She starts the book with a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Custom-House": "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations."

But she also recognizes the potato's difficulties in flourishing in foreign soil. The children of those older Indians suffer a different kind of homesickness, for a "home" they've never even known.

In "Going Ashore," the last of three connected stories that comprise the book's perfectly rendered second half, the character Kaushik remarks on an overheard conversation: "They have lived here, in each other's company, all their lives. They will die here."

"I envy them that," Hema replies. "I've never belonged to any place that way."

Ms. Lahiri's true gift is her clear-eyed yet loving depiction of both the joys and sorrows of feeling untethered. Ironically, that's precisely what will undoubtedly keep readers attached, wherever her pen may take her next.

Jhumpa Lahiri

(Knopf, $25)

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