Her father, a retired professional, pays a short visit to see his new grandson, Akash, who was just a baby when the grandmother died unexpectedly on the operating table. Ruma has married Adam and moved to San Francisco. The title story explores a daughter’s difficulty dealing for the first time with her recently widowed father. The play of intermarriage in these stories is a major narrative force. And in this collection, the children have rejected so much of their heritage by marrying or forming family with non-Indians. These are all highly successful, upper middle class professionals whose children have either succeeded wildly or at least been given the tools to do so. Unaccustomed Earth examines the Indian expatriate experience in America again (as in her novel The Namesake) both from the viewpoint of an older generation immigrating to America and of their children, who are truly American but always burdened by the Indian cultural past. It would be great and possible to imagine the characters from one story here running into another set of characters from another story and not only understanding each other but forming yet a new story. What amazes is that she does it with such originality in each one and yet ties the experience together so flawlessly. Jhumpa Lahiri has been exploring the expatriate Indian experience in America for some time so it comes as no surprise that her second collection of short stories mines this territory. (Though some would say that Oates and her like carry a bigger bag of similar tricks.) Successfully, contrast Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Tyler. There are successful and unsuccessful (or satisfying and unsatisfying) writers in each category. Other writers seem to explore the same territory with each new work, mining deeply into complex themes, sets of characters, mood, and locale. We all know writers who appear to come to each new work with a striking sense of discovery, the narrative seemingly completely new, original and refreshed. One of the perennial questions about a writer’s work surrounds the problem of theme and story.

Unaccustomed earth stories