Patricia Duncker
Coming to America
This substantial collection of short fiction became an instant bestseller upon publication in America and it is easy to see why. Lahiri occupies the classic territory of women’s interest fiction: domestic space, family relationships, and tensions, spoken and unspoken, between lovers, parents and children, siblings with shared childhoods, husbands and wives. The social community with which she deals is limited, and carefully defined. Her central characters are all Bengalis, Indian immigrants to the USA. Everyone is either rich and qualified, or busy acquiring university qualifications in order to get rich. Lahiri’s stories of intimate connection, or disconnection, take place between people who are already related or having sex. Political catastrophes, wars and rumours of wars are subjects for photography or inconvenient disruption – like the assassination of Mrs Ghandi, which results in riots on a trip home to Delhi. Natural disasters and diseases are wheeled on, like car crashes, to untie emotional knots: in ‘Going Ashore’, the tsunami sweeps Kaushik to his doom and out of the heroine’s arranged marriage. No one is bothered by religious or political convictions of any kind. Family and intimate relationships are what matter; the rest of the world is an unpleasant backdrop to the main act. The Americans say grace before settling down to Thanksgiving turkey. No one else even lights a joss stick or visits a shrine.
The material of these tales is not new. Bharati Mukherjee is Lahiri’s literary foremother. The Tiger’s Daughter (1971) and Wife (1975) examine exactly the same immigrant trajectories and represent the same encounters between Bengalis and the New World or Bengalis going home, transformed by the experience of another country. Lahiri
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings