I have been a passionate defender of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing over the years, defending her publicly on blogs (see this old blog post of Manish's), in academic contexts, and even at friends' book clubs. I’ve taught her books and even written an essay on naming that does a close reading of her 2003 novel The Namesake. Some critics and readers who are not fans complain that her books leave them cold -– there’s not to go on in terms of plot, and the characters, with their bourgeois New England backgrounds and relatively quiet lives, are not exactly the stuff Michael Bey movies are made of. Other friends and acquaintances of mine have come to her writing expecting her to be an “Indian” author, and been disappointed to discover that she’s really “not very Indian” –- South Asia only figures in her work periodically.
My defense of Lahiri has generally followed a two-fold pattern: first, craft matters, and Lahiri pays attention to her sentences. That's why I value Lahiri and have generally dismissed sentimental Indian diaspora writers like Meena Alexander or Chitra Divakaruni. Secondly, Lahiri has been one of a very small number of writers to explore the mainstream second-generation immigrant experience with a degree of seriousness and care. For that reason, I respect the fact that Lahiri does not try to play her Indian cultural heritage for "multicultural" exoticism, but rather considers it as merely one among many pieces of the contemporary American puzzle. (If some people are disappointed at the absence of the smell of curry powder, perhaps we should be asking them to reconsider what they were looking for to begin with.)
Alongside her short stories, Lahiri has published several autobiographical essays in recent years that have all covered somewhat similar ground (see this essay, for example, from 2009).
With her latest piece in the New Yorker Lahiri seems to me dangerously close to jumping the shark. Lahiri’s essay is ostensibly a reflection on her childhood experience of books and her growing interest in becoming a writer. While there is as always a high degree of care and precision –- the emphasis on craft again –- the full extent of Lahiri’s navel-gazing often leaves the reader struggling to remain interested:
In the fifth grade, I won a small prize for a story called “The Adventures of a Weighing Scale,” in which the eponymous narrator describes an assortment of people and other creatures who visit it. Eventually the weight of the world is too much, the scale breaks, and it is abandoned at the dump. I illustrated the story—all my stories were illustrated back then—and bound it together with bits of orange yarn. The book was displayed briefly in the school library, fitted with an actual card and pocket. No one took it out, but that didn’t matter. The validation of the card and pocket was enough. The prize also came with a gift certificate for a local bookstore. As much as I wanted to own books, I was beset by indecision. For hours, it seemed, I wandered the shelves of the store. In the end, I chose a book I’d never heard of, Carl Sandburg’s “Rootabaga Stories.” I wanted to love those stories, but their old-fashioned wit eluded me. And yet I kept the book as a talisman, perhaps, of that first recognition. Like the labels on the cakes and bottles that Alice discovers underground, the essential gift of my award was that it spoke to me in the imperative; for the first time, a voice in my head said, “Do this.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/13/110613fa_fact_lahiri#ixzz1OumKmTyV(link)
Read charitably, this passage is simply an incidental event from childhood that helped validate Lahiri’s early interest in writing and her confidence in her abilities as a storyteller. Read less charitably, the passage could be read as: I decided I wanted to become a writer when I won a prize for a story I wrote in the fifth grade.
Again, this essay is far from all bad. There is a poignant passage where Lahiri describes how she came to write her first story as an adult (at age 30) after taking a trip with her parents to Bengal: “It [the first story] was set in the building where my mother had grown up, and where I spent much of my time when I was in India. I see now that my impulse to write this story, and several like-minded stories that followed, was to prove something to my parents: that I understood, on my own terms, in my own words, in a limited but precise way, the world they came from.”
But not long after this, we are back into personal anecdotes that feel distinctly like padding to take advantage of the New Yorker’s generous per-word pay scale –- the story of another Indian family dealing with the loss of a child in childbirth, life for Indian immigrant families in the suburbs, and so on.
When I read these sorts of reflections, I worry that Lahiri has perhaps run out of ideas or inspiration. Aren’t there other kinds of narratives to work through than the one she has by now dealt with several times (in both essays and stories): of growing up as an Indian American in New England, going to college and graduate school, and finally, deciding, perhaps against her family's wishes, to become a writer? Doesn’t Lahiri have an interest in representing or engaging voices other than her own?
I will probably continue to be a fan of Lahiri’s, but I must admit my patience is wearing thin.