Jhumpa Lahiri fans will welcome her latest offering, a collection of eight rather longish short stories. The first five stories are unconnected, and the last three are about the same characters, how they meet in their youth and again as adults. Her characters are, as always, Indians immigrating to the United States and the stories are about how they and their children cope with their old and new identities. Lahiri’s gift for narrative detail gives her prose a cinematic quality; we feel we are watching the characters, not seeing through their eyes. It is this quality that makes us so interested in what will happen next, we are “there”, but we have no private access to the characters’ emotions. Like a movie, the characters’ actions have to explain themselves. If they don’t, then we find ourselves engaged, trying to figure them out. I find this aspect of Lahiri troubling in that very serious things happen in the stories – family members keep secrets from each other, a fiancé consistently cheats on his future bride, a young man rains emotional abuse on two little girls (his new stepsisters) who were left in his care. Motivation is evident, but in Lahiri's world of detached sorrow, there's no glimmer of redemption or renewal.
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