Clear-eyed but tender

On the basis of her collection of short stories and her novel, Jhumpa Lahiri is one of my favorite authors. Her stories all feel immediately familiar; their subject matter and her style leave no barrier between the page and me.

You could say they're a little too carefully written, there's none of the torrent, sloppiness and glancing genius of Rushdie or Roth. Or the overreaching boisterousness and larger-than-life truths of a Bollywood film.

But I don't know; for me, she's in the Jane Austen school of well-crafted stories within a certain world that she brings to life. Her characters are so believable, and there are no ugly missteps that yank you out of the story. Her tone is so crisp and clean, she gets right words to describe the exact emotion and recall the precise situation and there's always something underneath the story.

I love reading them, and they linger and rattle around in my head afterwards.

Here are some parts of a new short story in the New Yorker, Once in a Lifetime--about an Indian family that goes back to India, only to return and stay with the narrator's family--that caught my ear:

Here they shopped together for groceries, and complained about their husbands, and cooked at either our stove or yours, dividing up the dishes for our respective families when they were done. They knitted together, switching projects when one of them got bored. When I was born, your parents were the only friends to visit the hospital. I was fed in your old high chair, pushed along the streets in your old pram. ...

Whatever the reason you were coming, I gathered from my parents’ talk that it was regarded as a wavering, a weakness. “They should have known it’s impossible to go back,” they said to their friends, condemning your parents for having failed at both ends. We had stuck it out as immigrants while you had fled; had we been the ones to go back to India, my parents seemed to suggest, we would have stuck it out there as well. ...

Cinema of a certain period was the one thing my mother loved wholeheartedly about the West. She herself never wore a skirt—she considered it indecent—but she could recall, scene by scene, the outfits that Audrey Hepburn had worn in any given movie. ...

I did my homework at the dining table, unable to use the desk in my room. I worked on my ancient-Rome report, something that had interested me until your arrival. Now it seemed silly, given that you’d been there. I longed to work on it in privacy, but your father talked to me at length about the structural aspects of the Colosseum. His civil engineer’s explanations went over my head, were irrelevant to my needs, but to be polite I listened. I worried that he would want to see whether I had incorporated the things he said, but he never bothered me about that. He hunted through his bags and showed me postcards he’d purchased, and though it had nothing to do with my report, he gave me a two-lire coin.

Photo of Jhumpa Lahiri by Robert Deutsch in USA Today