Not Your Father’s Immigrant Lit

They meet in Rome: a cosmopolitan waypoint with a past that belongs to neither of them, which thus enables their brief, intense affair. In the end, though, Hema chooses not to follow Kaushik to Hong Kong but opts instead for the marriage she's agreed to: one that is passionless but surprisingly equitable. Hema, though coming from a more traditional family, and settling into a marriage partly facilitated by her parents, appraises Kaushik's request that she join him in Hong Kong as selfish and unyielding compared to the accommodation her fiancé offers: finding a new job near Hema and "coming to her." In a quiet, subtle way, it's a remaking of Indian tradition that emerges as more progressive than Kaushik's own wholesale abandonment of his painful past—and for that matter, a further step from the traditional gender norms than much of their adopted country.

This is mirrored elsewhere in the book. Hema's own family had progressed from shock at the "Western" independence of Kaushik's mother—drinking, smoking, not wanting to cook—to a sitcom-worthy American dilemma, gingerly asking Hema if she's still single in her late 30s because she prefers women. In "Hell-Heaven," the story of a daughter's perspective on her conservative mother's unhappiness in a lackluster marriage, the mother's demand for tradition and modesty is informed not by her piety, but her unrequited love for a young family friend, and her rage at his defection in marrying an American woman. In "Unaccustomed Earth," it is Ruma's father who pushes her to begin working again, after she's given up her job to stay home with her son. And her father, for that matter, surprises them both by filling the supportive role his late wife would have played as grandmother to Ruma's child and helpmeet around the house, before turning down Ruma's offer that he move in with her. Instead he admits that he prefers his austere new independence and solitude, leaving both father and daughter somewhat wistful for the certainties of tradition they're leaving behind.

But for Hema, those traditions hold unexplored possibilities. As she flies from Rome and Kaushik, the digital map of her journey, pointing toward India, emerges in her mind as "the only road available now." Kaushik's end, which comes soon after, is sadly fitting: he is swept away by the tsunami that devastated the coastlines around the Indian Ocean while vacationing on a Thai beach with other Western families: in the area but not of it, and vice versa; dying without a home.

With protagonists of a uniformly affluent, educated, culturally literate and generally liberal stripe, Lahiri's third book should perhaps be considered the literature of assimilation rather than immigration. And this in itself says a lot: about the degree of integration that releases a literature from its conventions and allows its characters the ho-hum individuality long reserved for America's average Joes. Perhaps the popularity of Lahiri's fiction indicates a readiness to broaden that national average and allow the literary stand-ins for newer Americans to be as boring as the rest of us. The end of the book points a step further: past the white-bread sameness of daily worries to a grappling with cultural tradition that can change that tradition from within.

© 2008