Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel “Unaccustomed Earth” is not so much about the physical spaces that we inhabit that are foreign to us. Although she takes us all over the world with her characters who find themselves far from the place they and their families call home, Lahiri’s novel refers to the treacherous, unknown terrain of the human experience.
“Unaccustomed Earth” presents its readers with eight short stories in two parts, with part two being three stories focused on one set of characters from varying perspectives. In each story, Lahiri introduces her readers to a new character and often their familial or close relationships.
We start off the novel with Ruma and her changing relationship with her father, both wrestling with the death of Ruma’s mother and how to rekindle a bond they never really had. Later, we encounter an older sister Sudha and her little brother Rahul, as Sudha attempts to navigate her feelings of culpability with Rahul’s downfall. We also come to see Hema and Kaushik, childhood family friends who reconnect at completely new stages in their lives.
Although these are not the only characters we meet, each individual story paints an intimate portrait of navigating new territory in one’s personal life while living vastly different from immigrant parents.
The novel primarily focuses on the voices and stories of these first-generation children turned adults (with the exception of Paul, who recants the story of his Bengali housemate Sang) in territories unknown to their parents.
However, Lahiri seems to be giving voice to these hopeful parents with an epigraph from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” in her stories: “My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”
Whether Lahiri is pointing to the first-generation’s lack of agency over their own choice to inhabit this “fresh soil,” the wealth of opportunities that come from striking their roots into it, or questioning whether or not flourishing really does happen in unaccustomed earth, it is clear that this collection of characters explores displacement, assimilation and the general tragedy of being human.
Lahiri unveils cultural roots that are part of the human experience that let her readers discover these bits and pieces of tumult and vulnerability that exist in life. The emotions, the events and the wind that sweeps her characters to and fro takes the readers with them, leaving them breathless and in tears by the end.
Despite all its unfinished, raw endings, unsatisfying and unpleasant but all the more realistic, Lahiri reveals the simple and the cyclical that appears in all of her characters’ lives.
The realities of a father trying to connect with his daughter in some way illuminate another woman’s decision to settle with married life. A roommate’s observations of his housemate struggling with her fiance augment an older sibling’s inner turmoil when she has failed to make her brother succeed in America. All are separate, but seemingly revealing of a truth in another.
Lahiri explores the ever tumultuous waters of what it means to be a parent, a daughter, a son, a lover, a wife, a husband, an onlooker, a sister, a friend, all prey to the unknown that lies beyond their relationships. “Unaccustomed Earth” is a heartbreaking reminder of what it means to live.
Nicole Sydor is a graduate student earning her Masters in teaching to earn a certification in both secondary English and French.
