I just started reading Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth" and before I started on it, I had made myself beleive that it was only "The Namesake" that was so immeasurably depressing. But I see now that it was perhaps her earlier work "The Interpreter of Maladies" that was relatively uncharacteristic. Don't get me wrong - her portrayal of the second generation Indian is accurate - perhaps too accurate to make for comfortable reading. And there are some works like that - intended to make you hot under the collar, intended to prod your conscience into perhaps inspiring a change - if atleast for the first few fired up moments before the inertia of convenience or habit forces things back to how they used to be. But in JL's book, I feel no such uplifting motive. Rather I feel resentment that she is offloading her underlying personal sense of guilt (the legacy of all second-generation Indians in America) on the readers by brutally honest insights into the minds of her main characters. I think she makes their flaws and weaknesses larger than life so that she (and her reader) can feel comforted that they are better by comparison. Note that this tirade is far from well-researched or backed by any fact - so if it turns out JL is a model daughter and was raised exclusively in India, and her uncanny insight into the minds of her American-born-or-raised characters is pure creative genius - then don't hurl brickbats at me. Regardless of the veracity of my resentment, I do think her first generation Indians are often plastic beings - infused with just enough life and thought to influence the story in the direction it needs to take. There is only strife in the differences, no glory, no growth, no revelation. And yet her title was chosen from words that extolled the virtues of transplanting generations onto new lands!
Perhaps this tirade is not so much against JL's storytelling that evokes all that is melancholy and challenging about being rooted in unaccustomed earth - because after all, it is her enormous talent that forces opinion and painful truths to the surface for her reader. Its perhaps resistance at being self-labelled along with some of her characters as self-centered, individualistic, lacking in true depth of emotion for anyone outside of the self and what is gratifying to the self in the fleeting present. It is perhaps denial that 40 years of marriage and family could've yeilded less true love for a couple than a fleeting summer romance with a stranger. It is perhaps guilt, that while not as abandoned as her characters, I too am nurturing neglect and shame wrapped in defensive individualism.